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Hie Rise and Fall of

the Bulgarian Connection

EDWARD S. HERMAN and FRANK BRODHEAD

SHERIDAN SQUARE PUBLICATIONS, INC.
NEW YORK

Publisher's Note: This book is one of a series of in-depth studies
of current intelligence- and media-related issues. For a
catalog, please write to Sheridan Square Publications, Inc ,
P. O. Box 677. New York. NY 10013.

Library of Congress Calaloging-in-Publication Data

Herman, Edward S.
The rise and fall of the Bulgarian connection.

Includes index

I. John Paul 11. Pope, 1920- — Assassination
attempt, 1981. 2. Espionage — Bulgaria. 3. Disin-
formation — United States. I. Brodhead, Frank.
II Title.

BXI378.5.H48 1986 364 r524'0945634 86-6582

ISBN 0-940380-07-2
ISBN 0-940380-06-4 (pbk.)

This book is a compelling exposd of Che plot behind the plot — the
concoction by the Italian secret services of a Bulgarian Connection in
the attempted assassination of the Pope.

The reader of this book is faced with staggering proof that the media
utterly failed to meet acceptable standards of care and professionalism.
The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection is a serious and realistic
assessment of the handling by the western press of a propaganda trick; it
shows how the press was led by a handful of journalists linked to the
CIA into accepting as proof a fabricated story.

In following this case, lawyers were disheartened by the erosion of
the principle of the presumption of innocence. And just as the legal sys-
tem failed to probe the case against the accused Bulgarians in accor-
dance with that presumption, so the media ignored information suggest-
ing hidden political motives behind the accusations.

The book is a chilling indictment of our so-called "free" press, a
press which abuses its freedom by omissions, by half-truths, and by stir-
ring the continuation of a Cold War climate. It deserves to be read and
remembered.

—Sean MacBride, S.C.

Sean MacBride is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (1974), the Lenin
Peace Prize (1977), and the American Medal of Justice (1978); former Chief of
Staff of the Irish Republican Army, Foreign Minister of Ireland, and United Na-
tions Ambassador; U.N. Commissioner for Namibia; and author of the UN-
ESCO Report on The New World Information and Communication Order; cur-
rent Chairman of the Board of Advisers of the Institute for Media Analysis, Inc.

The Institute for Media Analysis, Inc. is a non-profit educational institution
devoted, in part, to the study of western media disinformation and deception op-
erations. This book was prepared with the assistance of the Institute and mem-
bers of its Board. For further information about the Institute for Media Analysis,
Inc., please write to: IMA, 145 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012.

Contents

Preface ix

1. Introduction 1

2. The Evolution of the Bulgarian Connection 9

3. The First Conspiracy:

Agca and the Gray Wolves 42

4. The Rome-Washington Connection 66

5. Darkness in Rome:

The Western System of Induced Confession 101

6. The Disinformationists:

Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen 123

7. The Dissemination of the Bulgarian Connection Plot 174

8. Conclusions 206

Appendices:

A. Did the Western Media Suppress

Evidence of a Conspiracy? 216

B. Bulgaria and the Drug Connection 225

C. The Use and Misuse of Defectors 234

D. Sterling versus Andronov 241

E. The Georgetown Disinformation Center 245

Index 248

"Destroy his fib or sophistry: in vain —
The creature's at his dirty work again."

—ALEXANDER POPE, 1735

"After a disinformation effort has been launched,
if it gets into replay it can be manipulated
for long periods of time using assets in
other areas and be revived at will."

— CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, 1982

Preface

On March 29, 1986, a jury in Rome, composed of two judges and
six lay members, concluded that three Bulgarians and six Turks
charged with conspiracy to assassinate Pope John Paul II should be ac-
quitted for lack of evidence. The decision was an abrupt and, for many,
surprising end to four years of claims and speculations about the "Bul-
garian Connection." During those years the charges, linked in the
media to more general accusations that the Soviet Union stood behind
"international terrorism," regularly found their way into the headlines:
"Dramatic new revelations. ... " "The investigation is continu-
ing. . . . " "Bulgaria today angrily denied. . . . " "U.S. officials re-
fused to speculate. ..." Long bef ore the trial began, the flow of leaks
from a supposedly secret investigation, and repeated assertions by sup-
porters of the Connection that the evidence was abundant and compel-
ling,' conditioned most people in the West to believe that the Bulgarians
were guilty.

From its inception, however, the case had rested on the testimony of
the would-be assassin, a young Turkish terrorist named Mehmet Ali
Agca. It was therefore somewhat disconcerting to those who had taken
the charges seriously that on the opening day of the trial, in May 1985,
Agca's first sentences to the court announced that he was Jesus Christ,
and that he had returned to warn of the imminent end of the world. He
revealed further that he held the occult secrets of Fatima, that the Pope
supported him in his claims to be Jesus, and that mysterious forces in
Rome wanted to kidnap him and set him up as Pope. To prove his
claims about being Jesus, and incidentally to support his charges against

1 . Paul Henze, in a 1985 update of his book. The Plot to Kill the Pope (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), wrote that the case for Bulgarian involvement has gotten
"continually stronger" and the "evidence" for the Plot has "steadily accumulated to the
point where little rational doubt is now possible" (p 196).

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the Bulgarians, he offered to raise Ihe dead in the presence of President
Reagan and other world leaders.

The prosecutor, Antonio Marini, claimed that Agca was deliberately
sabotaging the case. Others maintained that Agca was just having some
good fun, or that he was mysteriously signaling his Bulgarian col-
laborators to rescue him from jail. 2 Still others asserted that Agca was
mad. The case became a shambles, but dragged on for almost a year.
Agca agreed to dozens of conflicting versions of the truth, shifting
major claims two or three times within half an hour. He launched into
tirades about the Soviet Union, or western imperialism, and then be-
came confused when the judge sternly reminded him about the here and
now of the case. He withdrew in protest from the trial several times,
each time returning with an even more improbable explanation of his
shifts in testimony. But he stuck to his guns that he was Jesus Christ,
come to announce the end of the world.

While the prosecution successfully developed a coherent case for a
papal assassination conspiracy by Agca and perhaps a dozen of his as-
sociates in the Turkish rightwing movement called the Gray Wolves, the
case against the Bulgarians made sense only if one believed it already. 3
Not a single witness was produced during the trial to support Agca's
claims that the assassination plan was hatched in Bulgaria, that he had
plotted with Bulgarians in Rome, or that he had collaborated with Bul-
garians on the day of the assassination attempt itself. Despite a lengthy
summation before the court in which Marini frequently implied that the
Bulgarians stood behind the assassination attempt, this was so much
rhetoric: While asking for prison sentences for Agca and three of his
Turkish collaborators, the prosecutor was compelled to recommend dis-
missal of the charges against the three Bulgarians for lack of evidence.
The jury, in its turn, however, acquitted all of the defendants of the con-
spiracy charges."

2. The prosecutor also suggested this in his final summing up, 'although he never indi-
cated how the Bulgarians could have rescued Agca, or why, after Agca had given up "sig-
naling" he still failed to produce any confirmable evidence about Bulgarian involvement.

3. The present writers have always maintained that the claims and demonstrations of a
Bulgarian Connection were deficient in both logic and evidence. While this position has
been sustained in the trial and court judgment, we show in this book that the fatal weak-
nesses of the case were quite apparent when the Connection was at its peak of popularity
(see especially Chapter 2).

4. In Italian criminal law, in addition to a finding of guiltyornot guilty, there is a third
possibility, a finding of not guilty because of insufficient evidence. Thus, failure to prove
a charge beyond a reasonable doubt does not mandate, as it does in the United States, a

PREFACE

The trial in Rome raises many questions. If the only evidence against
the Bulgarians consisted of assertions by an imprisoned and half-crazed
criminal, why did anyone in the Italian state apparatus take them seri-
ously? Did Agca think up these charges himself, or was he coached and
supplied with information by people who somehow gained access to
him in his solitary confinement? And how was the claim of a Bulgarian
Connection sustained for four years in a Free World media that prides
itself on investigative reporting and skepticism about sources? Was this
a case of massive disinformation, beginning with planted stories and
then growing to a universally agreed upon version of the truth? Or was
the media's cooperation with the myth of the Bulgarian Connection sim-
ply a series of journalistic mistakes, taking the error-ridden Italian judi-
cial process at its word and elaborating on the story from there?

In this study of the rise and fall of the Bulgarian Connection we at-
tempt to answer these questions. Its main thesis is that the only Bulga-
rian Connection in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II existed in
the minds of its originators and spokespersons in the West and in the
selective coverage of the topic in the western mass media. The story of
the "rise" of the Connection is therefore the tale of how and why this
politically useful story was put over by a small coterie of U.S. jour-
nalists who we believe to be propagandists and disinformationists, most
notably Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen. 5 More
broadly, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection is a case study
of how the mass media of the Free World function as a propaganda sys-
tem.

The "fall" of the Bulgarian Connection may be something of a mis-
nomer. While the case against the Bulgarians has been dismissed, it
does not follow that the public will now be provided with sufficient in-
formation about the failed case to alter their well-ingrained perceptions

finding of not guilty.

5. Claire Sterling's September 1982 Reader's Digest article, "The Plot to Kill the
Pope," launched the Bulgarian Connection in the western media. Paul Henze. former
CIA station chief in Ethiopia and Turkey, wrote influential background reports proposing
a Bulgarian Connection shortly after the assassination attempt. These reports were used by
many major media outlets (see Chapters 6 and 7). Sterling elaborated her views in The
Time of the Assassins (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), while Henze later
produced The Plot to Kill the Pope (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983). Michael
Ledeen, though playing a lesser role, served to link the ideas of Sterling and Henze to the
Reagan administration and to the influential Georgetown Center for Strategic and Interna-
tional Studies. We analyze the product and influence of these, the Big Three, in Chapters
5, 6. and 7.

xii

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

of Bulgarian and Soviet guilt. In our analysis of the rise of the Connec-
tion, we stress that the initiation and handling of the case in Italy, and
the willingness of the western media to accept uncritically a stream of
implausible allegations, were based not only on western preconceptions
and prejudices, but also on the serviceability of the Plot to important
political interests. Both external pressures and internalized preferences
caused the Italian courts and the media to follow blindly a politically
convenient western party line. And just as the party line was followed
uncritically, so alternative lines of fact and argument were not pursued,
and dissent from the preferred view was rarely admitted to public in-
spection.

With the case against the Bulgarians now rejected by an Italian court
after a lengthy trial, the mass-media sponsors and supporters of Sterling
and other proponents of the Connection will have no interest in explain-
ing to the public why they were wrong and how the public was manipu-
lated into accepting a myth. Earlier critics of the Plot will not be hon-
ored for their foresight, but will continue to be marginalized. The
creators and disseminators of the party line will not be subjected to close
inspection and serious criticism, but will be given further access to the
media, now to explain the legal setback. And out of their explanations
the Bulgarian Connection will arise like a phoenix, available once again
for regular service by conservative politicians and pundits.

The bases on which the Bulgarian Connection will be revived became
clear in the mass media's coverage (or noncoverage) of the waning days
of the trial. It is apparent that media creators of the Connection like
Claire Sterling and Paul Henze have not been discredited, and that the
media will recycle themes already advanced by Sterling, Henze, and
others in explaining why the case was lost. For example:

• It will be argued that the case failed because western legal stand-
ards require excessive evidence in order to protect the innocent. Of
course, Sterling and the mass media operated on principles precisely the
reverse of this great western tradition, asserting for years that the Bulga-
rians and Soviets were guilty prior to any judicial rulings. They work
both sides of the street, arguing guilt beforehand and explaining away a
decision of non-guilt on the basis of western presumptions of innocence!
So while the KGB really did it, this couldn't be proved with the overly
cautious and soft legal system of the West.

• In explaining the loss of the case, Sterling and company will also
return once again to the cleverness of the KGB in hiding its guilt be-
neath a web of proxies. Initially they charged that the very absence of

PREFACE

xiii

evidence was proof of Soviet guilt, because the professionals of the
KGB were always careful to establish "plausible deniability," and left
no clues behind. As there were no clues, ergo, the Soviets did it. Ster-
ling and Henze abandoned this line when the case rested on Agca's claim
that three or more Bulgarians openly paraded around Rome with him,
hosted him socially, and participated in the May 13, 1981 shooting.
With the loss of the case, we believe Sterling and Henze will return to
the plausible deniability argument, assuming, probably correctly, that
the western media will once again fail to challenge them with facts or
the record of their somersaults.

• Sterling and Henze will also contend that the case was lost because
the western powers f ailed to cooperate fully with Italian authorities in
bringing the KGB to heel. Sterling has made this point frequently, argu-
ing that the Reagan administration has been fearful that revelations of
Soviet misbehavior would undermine ddtente! 6 It is testimony to the
power of ideology and interest that this Orwellian nonsense has not in-
terfered in the least with Sterling's credibility as an expert. 1

• It will be contended further that Soviet threats coerced the Italian
government into voluntarily losing the case, again to preserve ddtente."
Before the 1985-86 trial, while the case was under investigation by
Judge Ilario Martella, Sterling, Henze, and the mass media periodically
claimed that the Bulgarian Connection was being built in the face of
strong political opposition. They have never acknowledged the exis-
tence of potent vested interests and biases favoring the pursuit of the
case.' And as Martella shared the Sterling-Henze preconceptions, he
was consistently lauded as hardworking and conscientious and his in-
vestigation was found to be meticulous and thoroughgoing. 10 With the

6. "I think there's been a deliberate effort by certain sections of the government not to
take a public position that would concede any possible Bulgarian-Soviet connection be-
cause they consider it a destabilizing factor in the East- West power balance for the public
to know such things." ("Why Is the West Covering Up for Agca? An exclusive interview
with Claire Sterling," Human Events, June 26, 1984, p. 54.)

7. See Chapters 6 and 7 for an analysis of Sterling's conspiracy theories, overall record,
and hegemonic position in mass media expositions of the plot from August 1 982 to mid
1985.

8 A Wall Street Journal editorial of January 21. 1985, states that: "Claire Sterling, the
Rome-based journalist and terror expert, says the Italian judiciary [sicj is scared to death
the politicians will insist on such a coverup [a deal where Antonov makes a limited con-
fession and is released]."

9. These are developed at length in Chapters 4, 6, and 7

10. We show in Chapter 5 that while Martella was hardworking, his biases and conduct
of the investigation left everything to be desired.

xiv

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

thoroughgoing and open trial" yielding a rejection of the Bulgarian
Connection, the powerful supporters of the Connection will resort once
more to a political explanation of this (to them) untoward result. 12 When
the disinformationists succeed, it is because the truth is on their side;
they lose only because of the intrusion of "politics"!

• Finally, it will be alleged that an enormous and uncontested Soviet
disinformation campaign affected the climate of opinion in the West,
contributing substantially to the loss of the case. This has already been a
primary thrust of Sterling, Henze, and their close allies at the George-
town Center for Strategic and International Studies, the primary sources
for media commentary on both the case in Rome and "international
terrorism" in general. 13

We predict that these rationalizations will be given far more exposure
than any analyses showing the case to have been an obvious fraud from
the beginning, and one which survived only by virtue of media conni-
vance. 14 While most journalists and editorial writers in the respectable
media will no longer make outright assertions that the KGB organized
the plot to kill the Pope," the contrary case — showing that the Plot was

11. The Martella investigation was not open This allowed its biases and evidential
weaknesses to be kept under cover until the trial forced them into public view.

12. This was greatly facilitated by prosecutor Marini's closing statement in the trial in
which he suggested that the case was lost because the judge refused to allow sufficient
time to call all the necessary witnesses. The mass media quickly latched on to this oppor-
tunity to rationalize the loss of the case. (See, e.g., Elisa Pinna and Luca Balestrieri.
"Conviction of Bulgarians in papal plot trial seen as unlikely." Christian Science Moni-
tor, March 14, 1986; John Tagliabue, "Acquit Bulgarians, Prosecutor Asks," New York
Times, February 28, 1986.) These articles fail to note the following: (1) that the trial was
exceptionally lengthy and called a very large number of witnesses; (2) that it had been pre-
ceded by a two-year investigation which presumably yielded relevant and usable data; and
(3) that Marini's effusions may have been a political gesture to protect the Italian estab-
lishment from attacks for having brought a case and having expended substantial re-
sources where not even a diligent prosecutor could ask for a verdict of guilty.

13 "The International Implications of the Papal Assassination Attempt: A Case of
State-Sponsored Terrorism, " A Report of the CSIS Steering Committee on Terrorism,
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Kuppcnnan, Cochainnen, CSIS, I98S. For a further dis-
cussion of this document, see Appendix E. On the hegemony of western disinformation in
the national perception of the Bulgarian Connection, see Chapters 6 and 7.

14. See Chapter 7.

15 The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal — sometimes known as the "ideologi-
cal page" — is a notable exception Any claim that puts the enemy in a bad light finds a
welcome home there, whatever the credibility of the source, implausibility of the allega-
tion, or existence of incompatible facts (which are duly suppressed). One week before the
prosecutor himself asked for dismissal of the charges against the Bulgarians for lack of

PREFACE

a hoax and analyzing the earlier propaganda outpourings asserting KGB
guilt — will still not get much airing. Furthermore, the right wing, now
well represented in all parts of the mass media, will be quite free to con-
tinue to assert Bulgarian-Soviet guilt. Old, fabricated, and disproved
anticommunist tales never die, they merely fade into the dimmer back-
ground of popular mythology.

We make no pretense that this book provides an exhaustive treatment
of the Bulgarian Connection case. Our objective, instead, has been to
provoke serious debate on both the substantive issues involved in the
case and its treatment by the media. Toward this end, we have tried to
give a coherent and factually accurate alternative analysis to the stan-
dard version. We have provided information about the Turkish" back-
ground to the assassination conspiracy, and have explored the Italian
context in which the Bulgarian Connection was fabricated. We have
also attempted to set the scene in the United States itself, where the case
found a warmly receptive audience, and where disinformationists and
the media played an important role in originating and developing the
case.

We have gone into considerable detail to show the remarkable lack of
both coherence and empirical support for the standard version of the
Connection as expounded by Claire Sterling and Paul Henze. The weak-
nesses and chameleon-like shifts in the ingredients of the party line 16
raise serious questions about how and why the line came into being and
dominated the field so thoroughly for an extended time span. In short,
the independence and integrity of the mass media are at issue. We there-
fore devote considerable space to evaluating the quality of the media
sources in the case and the processes whereby a party line was in-
stitutionalized. 17

evidence, (he Journal editorialized that ' 'the question now is not whether there was a Bul-
garian Connection but when it began'' (February 19, 1986). This was based on the pro-
secutor's strongest flights of rhetoric and resort to weak hearsay evidence immediately be-
fore his abandonment of the case! It would be entirely out of character for (he Journal to
wait for the presentation of the defense case, or the decision of the court; it is the pro-
secutor who is saying what the editorialists want to believe. For the Journal, when Agca
says something compatible with their preconceptions, he "admits'' it, when he says
something incompatible with these beliefs, he "attacks his own credibility " This is the
language used by Gordon Crovitz in a Journal Op-Ed piece on February 12,1 986. entitled
"The Bulgarian Connection Still Holds." We may be sure that the Bulgarian Connection
will ' 'hold" indefinitely for the Journal as its truths are independent of the world of fact

16. See Chapters 2, 5, and 6.

1 7 See Chapters 6 and 7

xvi

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

The inadequacies of the mass media's performance on the Bulgarian
Connection were hardly a consequence of a poverty of materials; they
were the result of a failure to ask questions, to follow leads, and to use
readily available documents. As we describe in Chapters 2 and 7, the
media did do some investigative work on the Turkish right wing and the
Gray Wolves — the true locus of the plot to shoot the Pope — im-
mediately following the assassination attempt. Once the party line — the
Bulgarian Connection — was firmed up, however, all such leads were
abandoned and any context for the case incompatible with the line was
ignored.

The f ailure of the western media to meet its own alleged professional
standards is illustrated and dramatized by comparing its handling of the
case to that of a single reporter, Diana Johnstone. It is our belief that be-
tween May 13, 1981, and August 1985, Johnstone, writing on the Bulgar-
ian Connection and related issues for a small weekly newspaper, In
These Times (circulation about 30,000), conveyed more relevant facts,
used more pertinent documentary materials,'" and provided more intelli-
gent analysis and insight on the Bulgarian Connection than the entire
U.S. mass media taken together — radio, TV, newspapers, and weekly
news magazines. 19 While this is a testimonial to Johnstone's abilities, it
is also indicative of structurally based blinders that hamper and con-
strain mass media investigative efforts and reporting. These obstructions
are apparently not applicable to a reporter working for a small, nones-
tablishment publication. 20 This contrast, and the overall mass media per-

18. We will show in Chapter 7 thai the U.S. press completely ignored a major 1984 re-
port of the Italian Parliament on a rightwing conspiracy, P-2, that had penetrated a secret
service organization. SISMI, which played an important role in getting Agca to talk. Also
entirely unmentioned was a major court report of July 1985 that described repeated corrupt
behavior by SISMI, including the forging and planting of documents. These reports,
along with other materials available to but ignored by the U.S. media, were regularly em-
ployed by Johnstone.

19. Citations to Johnstone's writings will be found throughout the text below and in the
index.

20. On September 12, 1985, Ralph Blumenthal wrote in the New YorkTimes that "more
than a thousand news articles' ' had appeared in Italy in the previous 18 months on the story
of Francesco Pazienza, a key player in any analysis of the origins of the Bulgarian Con-
nection. Many of these articles claimed that Pazienza was involved in the manipulation of
Agca in prison, while most of the rest related to abuses with which Pazienza was a party as
a member of the intelligence agency SISMI and often in collaboration with U S disinfor-

PREFACE

xvii

formance on the Bulgarian Connection, suggest that on major foreign
policy issues the mass media is systematically unable to seek the truth
and serves instead to dispense system-supportive propaganda. 21

The authors are indebted to numerous individuals for help in translat-
ing documents, discussing the issues of this complex case, and reading
and evaluating parts of the manuscript. We would like to make special
mention of the following: Wolfgang Achtner, Feroz Ahmad, Sister El-
vira Arcenas, John Cammett, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockbum,
Kevin Coogan, Ellen Davidson, Doug Dowd, David Eisenhower,
Franco Ferraresi, Gianni Flamini, Anna Garbesi, Anna Hilbe, Diana
Johnstone, Martin Lee, Bill Montross, Ed Morman, Ugur Mumcu, Njat
Ozeygin, Donatella Pascolini, Nicholas Pastore, Jim O'Brien, Mark
O'Brien, Muieann O Briain, Ellen Ray, Bruno Ruggiero, Bill Schaap,
Hayden Shaughnessy, Helen Simone, and Lou Wolf. We owe very spe-
cial debts to Howard Friel and Andy Levine. Frank Brodhead would
also like to thank Christine Wing and Benjamin Boyd for their support
and great patience during this project. Finally, the authors want to ex-
press their gratitude to Carol and Ping Ferry for their generous financial
assistance. The authors remain responsible for the content of this book.

mationist Michael Ledeen. During this 18 month period, however, the New York Times
never discussed Pazienza, with the exception of a single, brief news article in the Business
Section of the paper on March 25, 1985. Our hypothesis is that this systematic avoidance
was a result of the paper's commitment to the party line, which would be disturbed by re-
ference to Pazienza and his shenanigans. Again, Diana Johnstone was not subject to this
kind of self-imposed prior constraint and could use these voluminous and highly relevant
press materials freely. (See further, Chapter 7, under "The New York 77mes-Sterling-Le-
deen Axis.")

2 1 . An interesting case study could be done on the timing of media investigations and
disclosure of the stolen wealth of the Marcos family. Although the Marcoses' looting oc-
curred over an extended period, the U.S. mass media were exceedingly quiet and their in-
vestigatory zeal reined in on that subject until the U.S. government withdrew its support
from Marcos in late 1985. At that point, as if by a tacit signal, there appeared a flood of
disclosures. While Marcos was a valued ally, his looting was off the agenda; with Marcos
in process of ouster, his looting was freely discussed.

l. Introduction

On May 13, 1 98 1 a young Turkish gunman fired shots at Pope John
Paul II as the Pope's vehicle circled slowly through the crowd in
St. Peter's Square. Gravely wounded, the Pope was rushed to the hospi-
tal. His assailant, Mehmet Ali Agca, was tackled by a nun and captured
by the crowd. The Italian police soon reconstructed his movements prior
to the shooting, seeking to determine his motives and accomplices. Yet
when Agca was brought to trial in July 1 98 1 , little of this information
was produced in court; his aims were still unclear and no co-con-
spirators were named.

Agca's crime was committed in the fourth month of the Reagan presi-
dency. From the outset administration officials and supporters sought to
link the assassination attempt to the Soviet Union and its allies, in accor-
dance with its new stress on "terrorism," and in aid of the new plans for
a military buildup at home and the placement of advanced missiles in
Western Europe. This effort did not bear fruit, however, until the publi-
cation of an article by Claire Sterling in the September 1982 issue of
Reader's Digest. Sterling maintained thai the attempted assassination,
previously thought to have been the work of a rightwing gunman, acting
either alone or as a member of a Turkish rightwing network, was in fact
instigated by the Bulgarian secret services, and behind them the KGB.
This latter claim took on particular significance because at that moment
the heir apparent to the terminally ill Leonid Brezhnev was Yuri An-
dropov, who had been the head of the KGB at the time of the assassina-
tion attempt. Thus a successful linking of the KGB to the shooting
would seriously cripple the prospective leader's ability to project any
moral claims for Soviet policies were he actually to succeed Brezhnev.'

1 Andropov received litcle notice in (he West as a possible successor to Brezhnev until
the death of Mikhail Suslov in January 1982 An article by Don Oberdorfer in the
Washington Post on April 3, 1982, mentioned Konstantin Chemenko as a likely succes-

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

The claim of a Bulgarian Connection received apparent confirmation
in November 1982, when Agca declared that several Bulgarian officials
residing in Rome had assisted him in his crime, and that the plan had
originally been laid while he was passing through Bulgaria in the sum-
mer of 1980. Two of the named officials had returned to Bulgaria, but
one of them, Sergei Antonov, deputy director of Balkan Air, was im-
mediately arrested. With the heightening of Cold War tensions, and
European debate and demonstrations over the scheduled deployment of
new U.S. missiles reaching their peak, Agca's accusations found a
ready and uncritical reception in the western media. While no indepen-
dent evidence linking Agca to the Bulgarians, or the Bulgarians to the
crime, was forthcoming, Agca's mere declaration and its apparent con-
firmation by the arrest of Antonov all but convicted Bulgaria in the
western press. Leaks of Agca's evolving claims, which soon included a
Bulgarian-instigated plot to murder Lech Walesa, served to keep the pot
boiling. Despite severe problems of fact and logic, the Italian judicial
machinery ground slowly but steadily through its investigations, cul-
minating in an official indictment of three Bulgarians and six Turks on
October 25, 1984. A trial of these indicted individuals began on May
27, 1985, and ended with the acquittal of the Bulgarians on March 29,
1986.

It is our judgment that the media's uncritical, even enthusiastic, em-
brace of the case developed by Claire Sterling and the Italian prosecu-
tion was not merely wrong, but also points up the more general prop-
aganda role played by the press. As we will show below, the credibility
of Agca, the primary (in fact, sole) witness — based on his character,
history, political affiliations, circumstances of imprisonment, and shifts
and contradictions in testimony — is close to zero. 2 Furthermore, the
logic of the case, as advanced by its leading proponents, was seriously
flawed and rested ultimately on Cold War premises. 3 We believe that
similar evidence and arguments put forward in a case not helpful to
western political interests would have been objects of derision and
quickly rejected and buried. 4

sor. It was not until Andropov was appointed to an important new post in the Party Sec-
retariat on May 24, and resigned from his position as head of the KGB two days later, that
he was regarded publicly in the West as a leading candidate to succeed Brezhnev This
period of the emergence of Andropov coincides with the sudden decision by Agca to
cooperate and name his alleged Bulgarian collaborators.

2 See Chapters 2-5

3 See Chapters 2, 5, and 6

4 For example, imagine the response of the West if a lifelong leftist terrorist, after

ONE: INTRODUCTION

A Dual Conspiracy

Where the creators of the Bulgarian Connection see one conspiracy, we
see two. The first was a conspiracy to assassinate the Pope. The second
was a conspiracy to take advantage of control over the imprisoned Agca
to pin the assassination attempt on the Bulgarians and KGB. We, like
Claire Sterling and her associates, believe there was a conspiracy to as-
sassinate the Pope. But who were the participants? In the Sterling model
it was the Bulgarians and KGB. But throughout the investigation and
trial in Rome, the only evidence of Agca's linkages that was not based
on his word alone (and that of Claire Sterling and company), suggested
a conspiracy rooted in a Turkish neofascist organization called the Gray
Wolves. Its members assisted Agca in escaping from a Turkish prison in
November 1979; aided, financed, and sheltered him during the 18
months prior to the assassination attempt; and cooperated with him in
carrying it out. There is extensive evidence in the final report of Inves-
tigating Magistrate Ilario Martella, and in the record of the Rome trial,
of these continuing and intimate contacts between Agca and the Gray
Wolves network in the months prior to the assassination attempt. Inves-
tigations into Agca's background in Turkey have also placed him
squarely in the midst of an intricate web of political rightists, drug deal-
ers, and gun runners — a large proportion also Gray Wolves — who were
the only known participants in the conspiracy to shoot the Pope.' We
develop these links, and the possible motivations that might have led
Agca and his associates to attempt to kill the Pope, in Chapter 3.

The main focus of our work, however, is on the second conspiracy,
which used the imprisoned Agca to advance various Italian and New
Cold War political interests. The Rome trial, while discrediting the Bul-
garian Connection, greatly strengthened the hypothesis that Agca was
coached to implicate the Bulgarians. This conspiracy was implemented

being held captive in a Bulgarian prison for 1 8 months, suddenly confessed that he had
acted for the CIA, several of whose officials he identified from a picture album showed to
him by the Bulgarian secret services!

5. Up to the time of the trial it was thought that Agca had one or more Turkish accom-
plices in Rome at the time of the assassination attempt. The trial raised doubts about any
on-the-scenc accomplices of Agca, although it has not diminished the force of the evi-
dence that Agca was moving through the Gray Wolves network in his passage through
Europe to the rendezvous in Rome. See further. Chapter 3, pp. 53-55.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

by the Italian secret services and their allies in the Vatican and the
Mafia, with assistance from other members of the Italian government,
their friends in the Reagan administration, and the press." We believe
that a powerful analogy can be drawn between the "confessions" ex-
tracted during the Soviet political trials of the 1930s and Agca's "con-
fessions" of 1982 and 1983. In Chapter 4 we describe the domestic and
international forces at work in recent years which encouraged the Italian
initiators to press Agca into implicating the eastern Bloc in the Plot. We
also discuss the background of the Italian security services, which were
mobilized early in the Cold War era as an activist, anticommunist in-
strument of U.S. and conservative Italian political aims. 7 These services
played an important role in rightwing destabilization strategies of the
1960s and 1970s, including efforts to plant fabricated evidence on the
Left. We discuss the massive rightwing conspiracy Propaganda Due, or
P-2, which was exposed in a major scandal shortly after the assassina-
tion attempt against the Pope in 1981 . An Italian Parliamentary Report
on P-2, issued in July 1984, showed that those agencies of the Italian
state which held Agca in captivity, which had daily access to him, and
which participated in the investigation of his evolving claims, had been
thoroughly penetrated by P-2.

The gradually accumulating evidence that Agca was induced to impli-
cate the Bulgarians by means of both positive incentives and threats is
spelled out in Chapters 4 and 5. We also describe the weaknesses of the
Italian judicial process in its investigative phase, which combined major
violations of judicial and scientific procedure in handling evidence with
a flow of timely leaks that allowed numerous Cold War points to be
scored by proponents of the Plot. We show in Chapter 5 that Judge
Ilario Martella was an ideal choice to pursue the investigation, quietly
dignified but dedicated to proving an a priori truth.

The Italians did not decide to pursue the Bulgarian Connection en-
tirely on their own. Italy is a part of the Free World, and it was caught
up in a web of larger interests. The Reagan administration's rearmament
plans and antiterrorism campaign provided encouragement, ideological

6. We believe that this conspiracy was loosely organized and tacit, not centrally di-
rected, and with a number of participants pursuing the same end quite independently,
some playing their role knowingly, others contributing innocently in the belief that they
were merely expressing or eliciting a self-evident truth. (See the beginning of Chapter 8
on the multiple invention of the second conspiracy.)

7 See Chapter 4.

ONE: INTRODUCTION

support, and political backing for such an initiative. 8 Encouragement
and support came in part from the pressures built up in the U.S. mass
media, but they also flowed through more direct channels. The penetra-
tion and manipulation of the Italian state by the CIA and other agencies
of the U.S. government is a matter of public record, confirmed by the
Pike Committee of the House of Representatives 9 and by many indepen-
dent Italian investigations. In Chapters 4 and 5 we describe this back-
ground of manipulation and quasi-dependency . We also discuss some of
the recent evidence in Italian court documents and in the press revealing
linkages and cooperative ventures between officials of the Reagan ad-
ministration and agents of the Italian secret services. We show that the
team of Michael Ledeen and Francesco Pazienza, which had already
achieved a notable success in manufacturing the "Billygate" scandal in
1980, was virtually directing U.S. -Italian relations during the Reagan
transition era. This team was well positioned to encourage the second
conspiracy and disseminate information linking the papal assassination
attempt to the Bulgarians and Soviets.

We also show that the Bulgarian Connection had already been con-
cocted in documents fabricated by the Italian secret services only days
after the assassination attempt, and that the idea of getting Agca to tell
this story had arisen early from several different sources. There were
numerous avenues through which interested parties in the secret ser-
vices, Mafia, Vatican, and other political interests could persuade,
threaten, and instruct Agca on a proper confession. The evidence
suggests that Agca was induced to confess properly by a variety of indi-
viduals and interests, sometimes acting alone, sometimes working in
collaboration. 10 We believe that the Italian background and the intema-

8 Pan of ihe conservative line on the Bulgarian Connection is that its prosecution suf-
fered grievously from Reagan administration and CIA negativism and foot-dragging,
rooted in a devotion to ddtente, with perhaps some assistance from KGB moles who have
penetrated the government. This line, which stands the truth on its head, reached its finest
flowering in the writings of Claire Sterling and in the Georgetown Center for Strategic and
International Studies pamphlet on the papal assassination attempt. See Chapter 6 and Ap-
pendix E.

9. The "Pike Committee" wasthe Select Committee on Intelligence of the U S. House
of Representatives. Its report on the CIA's record, completed in February 1976, was never
published by the government, but was leaked and made available by the Village Voice on
February 16 and 23, 1976. It was issued in book form by Spokesman Books in England in
1 977, with an introduction by Philip Agee, under the title CIA : The Pike Report For some
of its findings pertaining to the CIA in Italy, see Chapter 4, p. 73.

10. In the account of Giovanni Pandico, a former Mafia leader, now the chief state wit-

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

tional New Cold War political context are essential to understanding the
Bulgarian Connection. It is this context which explains why many indi-
viduals with access to Agca were anxious that he confess, and why the
western political and media environment was receptive to an implausi-
ble confession. This essential background, however, has rarely been
mentioned by the New York Times or the major media sources in the
West. Thus, while featuring prominently the report of Prosecutor Al-
bano and the final report of Magistrate Martella in 1984, the Times and
its mass media associates completely ignored the sensational findings of
the July 1984 Italian Parliamentary Report on P-2 and the major July
1985 Italian court report on the multiple abuses of Francesco Pazienza
and SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency with which he was as-
sociated. The only ' politics" which the media allow to enter the discus-
sion of the Connection is the Soviet concern over Solidarity and the
Polish upheaval, which happens to coincide with the interpretation of
the motivations for the assassination attempt developed by Claire Ster-
ling and her associates.

The reasons for this dichotomous treatment seem quite clear. If the
media is playing a supportive political role, it will not only concentrate
its attention on reports and political themes damaging to the enemy, but
it will also ignore any information that would suggest hidden political
motives behind the case or cast doubt on the quality of our allies (the
supporting cast). This allows commentators such as the Wall Street
Journal's, Suzanne Garment to endorse the Bulgarian Connection on the
basis of the integrity and even superior wisdom of the Italians: "Mind
you, this is the Italians — no American hawk paranoids but instead
people who live with a new government every thirty days. You simply
cannot doubt their word."" While it would be interesting to examine
Garment's view that political instability is a source of sound political
judgment, the more important point is that not only can we doubt the
"word" (and the political processes) of an Italian state machinery satu-
rated with P-2 cadres, but we must do so if we are to arrive at the truth
behind the Bulgarian Connection.

While the U.S. media have suppressed the Italian context of the Bul-
garian Connection, their treatment of the involvement of U.S. citizens
in the creation of the Connection attained an even higher level of prop-

ness in a [rial of the Naples Mafia, i( is suggested that a number of convergent interests —
Mafia. Vatican, and secret services — worked together in getting Agca to talk. See below.
Chapters 4 and 5

II Wall Street Journal. June 15. 1984

ONE: INTRODUCTION

aganda service. Here the very individuals actively participating in the
manufacture of the Plot were mobilized to serve as the main media
sources of information on the subject. The most important investigative
work — or, we should say, creative writing — in establishing the
hypothesis of the Bulgarian Connection was done by Claire Sterling,
Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen. Their writings in the New York
Times, Christian Science Monitor, Reader's Digest, and other publica-
tions, and their frequent appearances on the MacNeil/Lehrer News
Hour, the Sunday television news programs, and before Senator
Jeremiah Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism show them
to be the media's commentators of choice on the Bulgarian Connection.
That these individuals have long records of CIA and other intelligence
agency connections and disinformation service has not been disclosed to
the American public. We discuss their role and performance at length in
Chapter 6. In Chapter 7 we describe the remarkable dominance which
they have been able to exercise over the U.S. mass media in the dis-
semination of the Plot.

This pattern of media bias is a uniform characteristic of Red Scare
eras. In every such period, as during the Palmer raids (1919-20) or the
McCarthy years (1950-54), hysteria and bias overwhelm any sense of
fair play, justice, and concern for truthfulness. A wave of passion and
propaganda establishes guilt beforehand and makes doubts seem subver-
sive. While Red Scares require a favorable climate of opinion in which
to develop, they do not simply emerge spontaneously; rather, they are
cultivated and stoked by prospective beneficiaries and their agents. 13
The Bulgarian Connection met a need in the emerging New Cold War
comparable to that met by earlier Red Scares. We believe that it was
similarly created and stoked by Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, Michael
Ledeen, and their governmental and media allies. 11 These influential
disinformation specialists, linked to both the Reagan administration and
to the Italian secret services, first created and packaged the Bulgarian
Connection, and then helped sell it to the Italians. Finally, in a scenario
worthy of Pirandello, they became the terrorism "experts" and com-
mentators to whom the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor,

12. See Robert MurTay, Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-
Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1978)

13. It was also simultaneously created and stoked by Italian intelligence and other local
sources. This was a case of multiple invention and causation. S«e Chapter 8. pp. 206-09.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, and the NBC Nightly News turned to
elucidate and evaluate the real story of what the nefarious KGB was up
to.

2. The Evolution off the
Bulgarian Connection

This book is a case study in the response of the West — of its intelli-
gence agencies and mass media, intellectuals and disinfor-
mationists — to an act of terror. The response was complex, but the
"Bulgarian Connection" was its most important outcome. The Connec-
tion did not emerge full-blown from a single source; it grew piece by
piece over a period of four years, and many hands contributed to its
manufacture. In this chapter we will examine the craft of these many
laborers, and look at the evidence, claims, and hypotheses with which
they constructed the Connection.

The Preliminary Version: A Turkish Conspiracy

Looking back, it seems amazing that the story could have been turned around so
swiftly and smoothly, before the eyes of several hundred journalists gathered in
Rome from the four comers of the globe to cover the papal shooting. The truth
was close enough to touch for a fleeting instant, and then it was gone. At the
first sign of a probable conspiracy, government and Church leaders perceived
the dangers of exposing it. A wall of refracting mirrors went up overnight, de-
flecting our vision at every turn. 1

So begins Claire Sterling's argument that a great international cover-
up was organized to conceal the conspiracy that supported Agca's at-
tempt to kill the Pope. At the very outset of her study of the Bulgarian
Connection, Sterling characteristically distorts elementary aspects of the
historical record to make it appear that — against the callous indifference

I . Claire Sterling, TheTime of the Assassins (New York: Holt, Rinehan and Winston,
1983), p. 5.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

of the West and the active disinformation efforts of the East — she has
rescued the truth about the Soviet-Bloc conspiracy to kill the Pope.

What was "the truth that was close enough to touch"? According to
Sterling, Italian authorities determined immediately after Agca shot the
Pope that he had been aided by "other persons who remain unknown,"
as Attorney General Achille Gallucci put it in his arrest order. Judge
Luciano Infelisi, who signed the order, noted that "for us, there is
documentary proof that Mehmet Ali Agca did not act alone." These
quotations, from the May 15, 1981 issue of the Turin newspaper La
Stampa, are cited by Sterling at the beginning of her book. They are im-
mediately contrasted with a statement from the New York Times of the
same day that "Police are convinced, according to government sources,
that Mr. Agca acted alone." For Sterling, this was the beginning of the
cover-up.

As she develops this line of thought in the introductory pages of The
Time of the Assassins, Sterling makes four points:

1 . Italian officials were initially convinced that there was a conspir-
acy to kill the Pope, and then suddenly retreated on this issue, saying
that there was insufficient evidence;

2. The western media generally followed this lead, dropping any in-
vestigation into the possibility that there was a conspiracy to kill the
Pope, and taking as true Agca's claim to be "an international terrorist"
acting alone;

3. The conspiracy that the Italian authorities initially detected was
one involving international terrorists and Soviet-backed organizations;
and

4. The Italian authorities and the western media backed off from in-
vestigating this conspiracy because of their overriding interest in main-
taining or supporting detente.

Was there a cover-up? It is evident from a simple reading of the west-
em press in the days and weeks following the assassination attempt that
the question of a conspiracy was very much alive. A day-by-day ac-
count of the reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post
for the first ten days following, the assassination attempt, which we pre-
sent in Appendix A, clearly shows that Sterling's "wall of refracting
mirrors" was completely ineffective in stemming the media's pursuit of
a possible conspiracy. We also know from leaked documents and pub-
lished accounts of the investigation thai up to the time of Agca's trial.

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

Italian officials continued to pursue the possibility that he had help. 2 The
conspiracy under investigation, however, which Sterling fails to see, 3
was a Turkish conspiracy, based in the shadowy right wing network
called the Gray Wolves and in its parent organization, the Nationalist
Action Party of Turkey. To the extent that there was any official hesi-
tancy in investigating this wider conspiracy, therefore, it can only be in-
ferred that someone or some institution was reluctant to explore any
possible links to international fascist networks that might compromise
Italy's NATO allies

This finding, moreover, was reflected across the board in the U.S.
media. Summaries of the evening news broadcasts of the three major
U.S. television networks reveal a sustained interest in Agca's Turkish
roots." Time magazine, in its first issue after the assassination attempt,
described Agca as a "right-wing fanatic" and connected him to the
Nationalist Action Party. 5 Similarly, Newsweek' 's (far more extensive)
coverage placed Agca in the world of the Gray Wolves, even speculat-
ing on more far-reaching connections to European fascists as well. 6

Finally, we must point out that this preliminary model seemed so
compelling that it convinced even Claire Sterling, who made what were
perhaps her most cogent remarks on the Plot in an interview with People
magazine immediately after the papal shooting. 7

Some people are saying that the Russians plotted this because of the Pope's role

2. For example, on May 25, 1981. SISMI turned over to investigating magistrate
Domenico Sica the names of 1 1 Turks with whom Agca was known to have associated in
West Germany and/or Switzerland, and who were wanted by Turkish police for "subver-
sive activities" in association with the Gray Wolves (SISMI document number 1 356904)
Among the 1 1 Turks named were Mehmet Sener. Abdullah Catli, and Oral Celik. On May
27, 1981, DIGOS, the Italian anti-terrorist police, forwarded to Judge Sica information
about 17 "suspected Turkish citizens" who were known to have links with Agca (DIGOS
document number 051 195/81). This latter document was published in Espresso on De-
cember 6, 1982. (See Sari Gilbert, "3 Bulgarians Linked To Shooting of Pope,"
Washington Post, December 8, 1982.) The DIGOS report of September 15, 1981, (see
below, note 20) indicates that the investigation continued.

3 Just as Sterling can never see rightwing terror (see Chapter 6), so it is possible that
she is unable to recognize a rightist conspiracy as a genuine conspiracy.

4 Vanderbilt University Television News Archive, Television News Index and
Abstracts (May 14-25, 1981), pp. 831-902.

5. "Not Yet Hale, But Hearty," Time, June I, 1981, pp 34-35.

6. "The Man With the Gun," Newsweek, May 25, 1981, pp. 36-38.

7. "An Authority on Terrorism Offers A Chilling New Theory on the Shooting of the
Pope." People, June I, 1981, pp. 32-35

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

in Poland, but 1 think that's crazy. If it was an organized plot by a serious group.
I suspect there would have been a better getaway plan. Maybe this was a sort of
kamikaze mission, but usually these people are skillful at escapes. There would
have been some distraction in the crowd, some escape route. I could envision a
small splinter group of Moslem fanatics with Agca among them vowing to get
the Pope But more likely he made the final decision alone.

Sterling saw a possible motivation for an attack on the Pope, noting
that he "isn't perceived as just the head of the Roman Catholic Church,
but as the supreme symbol of the intrusion of western civilization'' into
the Moslem world. She also noted that the attack occurred shortly after
the release of the hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, and in the wake
of the attack on the Grand Mosque at Mecca, which in the Middle East
was widely (but falsely) attributed to the CIA and Israel." Sterling also
argued that the Pope's trip to Turkey in 1979 had been highly inflam-
matory and "a terrible mistake." Finally, she placed Agca within the
networks of the Gray Wolves, "the paramilitary wing of the neo-Nazi
National [sic] Action Party."

This, then, may be taken as the preliminary paradigm of any possible
"Connection" to Agca and the assassination attempt: a conspiracy
which was rooted in Turkish neofascism, sustained by the European
branches of the Turkish Right, and motivated by the problematic ideol-
ogy of the Gray Wolves and the unstable personality of Agca himself.
We call this the "first conspiracy." We will examine the Turkish roots
of this conspiracy in Chapter 3, and show that no agents of the East were
required to originate and execute Agca's assassination attempt.

The Challenges Confronting Sterling and Company

The facts unearthed by police and journalists that connected Agca to a
Turkish rightwing conspiracy provided a formidable challenge to Ster-
ling and her associates in their efforts to transform the case into a
Soviet-based plot. As the case for a Bulgarian-KGB Connection was de-
veloped, logical contradictions also emerged that demanded (but never
received) resolution. Some of the core problems were as follows:

Agca's relation to the "Gray Wolves." Those arguing for a Bulgarian

8 Agca had mentioned the attack on the Mosque and attributed it to the United States
and Israel in his 1979 note in which he first announced his intention to shoot the Pope

TWO EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

Connection were divided on whether Agca was always a KGB recruit
who was simply using his Gray Wolves associations for cover, or
whether he was in fact a genuine participant in rightwing activities and
terrorism who was later recruited by the KGB. Claire Sterling, for ex-
ample, told a congressional investigating committee in 1982 that Agca
was "a sleeper," a lifelong Soviet agent who was activated only when a
strike against the Pope became necessary. 9 Others have argued that
Agca was recruited at the university, or while in a Turkish prison, or
only later, in Bulgaria. But the only known facts are that Agca was con-
tinuously involved with Turkish fascists from his high school days.

Agca's stay in Bulgaria. A key element in Bulgarian Connection
scenarios has always been the fact that Agca stayed in Sofia, Bulgaria
for some days or weeks in the summer of 1 980. 10 Sterling and NBC-TV
claimed that the very fact of Agca's presence in Sofia proved Bulgarian
guilt, because the Bulgarian police know everything and must have been
"protecting" Agca. Thus, according to Marvin Kalb, it "seems safe to
conclude that he had been drawn into the clandestine network of the
Bulgarian secret police and, by extension, the Soviet KGB — perhaps
without his even being aware of their possible plans for him."" This is a
non sequitur that rests on a number of assumptions, some of them quite
foolish. Agca came into Bulgaria on a false passport, and the flow of
Turks through Bulgaria numbers in excess of a million a year. The as-
sumption that the Bulgarians knew of Agca's presence is therefore un-
proven. 12 The further assumption that, if his presence was known, he
must have been protected and recruited by the Bulgarians for some se-

9. "The Assassination Attempt on Pope John Paul II," Hearing before the Commission
on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 97th Congress, 2nd Session (September 23,
1982), p 7 She has never given evidence that this was so, but this has never been de-
manded of her by friendly congressional and media interlocutors.

10. Perhaps the most important aspect of his stay is that even Agca has rarely claimed
contact there with any Bulgarian official. For a long time he claimed to have worked
strictly through intermediaries, although eventually a Bulgarian official came into the pic-
ture. During the trial Agca disconceitingly took the new tack that on July 4, 1980. he had
been introduced to the First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Sofia, who visited him in
his hotel room!

11 "The Man Who Shot the Pope— A Study in Terrorism," transcript of NBC-TV
program of September 21, 1982, pp. 44-45.

12. During his testimony at the Rome trial on September 22, 1985. Gray Wolves leader
Abdullah Catli gave as one reason for Agca's visiting Bulgaria, instead of proceeding di-
rectly into Western Europe, the fact that the volume of Turkish traffic is so large that a
Turk may enter Bulgaria without having to undergo very careful checks!

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

cret purpose is simple-minded Cold War ideology. If the Bulgarians
knew who Agca was they may have been uninterested in him, or they
may have failed to arrest him because of incompetence or indifference
to the appeals of Turkish authorities, or they may have left him alone as
a favor to Turkish smuggling interests with whom the Gray Wolves
were linked.

The Bulgarian-Soviet motive. The issue of motive also bedevils various
accounts of the alleged Bulgarian link. Why would the Bulgarians or the
Soviets want to kill the Pope? Advocates of the Bulgarian Connection
hypothesis have built a motive out of the situation in Poland between the
election of Cardinal Wojtyla as Pope in 1979 and the proclamation of
Solidarity in late August 1980. It was the Pope's support for Solidarity
which is held to be the key to the Soviet desire to want him out of the
way, and at one point it was even claimed that he had declared his inten-
tion to lay down the papal crown and return to Poland in the event of a
Soviet invasion.

There are several very serious difficulties with this imputed rationale.
First, Agca had already threatened to kill the Pope in 1 979 during the
Pope's visit to Turkey, long before Solidarity existed or Poland was in
turmoil. This suggests the likelihood that the real explanation for the as-
sassination attempt is to be found in Turkey. Second, the timing of
Agca's alleged conspiracy with the Bulgarians also presents problems,
as Solidarity was formed in late August 1980, while, according to Ster-
ling, Agca's dealings in Sofia were largely completed by early July of
that year. Third, there is no reason to believe that killing the Pope would
have been useful to the Soviet Union, and the costs and risks of either a
successful or a bungled assassination plot were great. The magnitude of
the potential damage from such an effort has been demonstrated by the
events which have unfolded since May 1981, as the attempted assassi-
nation was ultimately pinned on the Soviets on the basis of mere suspi-
cion. Nowhere is the belief in Soviet complicity stronger than in Poland,
and it is hard to imagine how any Soviet official could have expected
that a successful assassination attempt would have quelled unrest in Po-
land. Furthermore, if an assassination had been convincingly linked to
the Soviet Union, this would have had a devastating effect on Soviet ef-
forts to oppose the new missiles planned for Europe and to advance the
gas pipeline project, goals then considered by the Soviets to be of great
importance. In short, this would have been an extremely foolhardy en-
terprise for the Soviet Union to embark on, and western analysts of

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

Soviet politics regard the Soviet leadership as cautious and not inclined
to adventurism. 13

Finally, there is some evidence that the Soviets regarded the Church
as a conservative force in Poland. According to the Turin newspaper La
Stampa, in December 1980 Vadim Zagladin, Vice-Secretary of Foreign
Affairs in the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, told the
Vatican that "Moscow does not intend to invade Poland, but that the
Church should continue to use its influence so that certain situations do
not escalate." (At this time western media and government officials
considered a Soviet invasion of Poland imminent.) A second Soviet of-
ficial, according to La Stampa, told Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal
Agostino Casaroli that "If the Church committed itself to stem the ardor
of the Polish strikers within limits acceptable to Moscow, then Moscow
in her turn would renounce the idea of an invasion."" 1 According to this
line of thought, which has considerable support in the historical record,
the Polish Pope, the Vatican, and the Polish Church acted as a stabiliz-
ing force in Poland; and the assassination of Pope John Paul II would
only threaten the very stability the Soviets sought there.

Operational ineptitude: ( I) hiring Agca. Each successive version of the
Bulgarian Connection has also had to wrestle with the overall ineptness
of the alleged plot. Why would the Bulgarians want to hire Agca in the
first place? Of the hundreds of rightwing terrorists wanted by the Tur-
kish government, Agca was probably the most notorious; and, as the
events of his 1985 trial have demonstrated, he was personally unstable.
As an anticommunist he would have little compunction in conf essing to
Bulgarian involvement. The hypothesis that Agca was hired by the Bul-
garians in the summer of 1980, after his escape from Turkey's
maximum security prison and then from Turkey itself, must contend
with the fact that at just that moment Turkey and Interpol were issuing
bulletins asking for his immediate arrest. In their respective reports,
Deputy Prosecutor Albano and Judge Martella stressed Agca's notori-
ety, maintaining that both the Bulgarians and the Turks who allegedly
assisted Agca should have known precisely with whom they were deal-

1 3 . See, e.g., George Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the
Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1982); John Lowenhardt, Decision-Making in Soviet
Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981 ); and Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod, How
the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).

14. Cited in "The Papal Attack Background," Intelligence Digest (Great Britain). Oc-
tober I, 1981.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ing and could not plead ignorance that "Farouk Ozgun" was in fact
Agca, the wanted criminal.' 5 Yet precisely this notoriety would have
caused any intelligence service to steer clear of Agca.

Operational ineptitude: (2) the Sofia gambit. In explaining the lack of
any direct evidence for Bulgarian or Soviet involvement, Claire Sterling
and her associates have always retreated to the notion that the KGB is a
very professional body that does things well, covers its tracks, and oper-
ates from a base of "plausible deniability." Thus the very lack of evi-
dence, according to the Sterling school, pointed to a Soviet hand in the
plot. In the version of the Connection developed in the second half of
1982 by Sterling in the Reader's Digest and by Marvin Kalb on NBC-
TV, the implausibility of bringing Agca to a prominent hotel in Sofia to
be recruited and/or to get his instructions was not mentioned. In the in-
terest of maintaining plausible deniability, however, Sofia is the last
place to which any Bulgarian co-conspirators would want Agca to be
traced. If contact between Agca and Bulgarian officials were observed
by western agents in Sofia — certainly a reasonable possibility — the
logic of hiring a fascist to provide a cover for a Bulgarian- and KGB-
sponsored plot would be badly compromised from the start.

Thus the presence of Agca in Sofia, rather than supporting a Bulga-
rian Connection, tends to undermine it. In fact, it more readily supports
two alternative views. The first is that someone wanted Agca to be
linked to Bulgaria before he got on with his assassination attempt, after
which he could be worked over at leisure until he "confessed." The
second, which we believe to be entirely valid, is that because Agca had
stayed in Sofia, Italian and other western intelligence services and prop-
agandists seized the opportunity to build a case which, with an induced
confession, would be salable in the well-conditioned West.

Operational ineptitude: (3) the assassination attempt. Another major
operational difficulty with the hypothesis of the Bulgarian Connection is
the gross ineptitude of the assassination attempt. It is hard to imagine a
more poorly managed plan of attack than the one employed in Rome.
Agca not only failed to kill the Pope, but he himself was neither rescued

IS. On a number of occasions Turkish authorities were notified that Agca had been
sighted in Italy, Switzerland, or West Germany, and unsuccessfully requested that he be
arrested For some reason, no negative implications have been attached to the West Ger-
man. Swiss, and Italian authorities for their failure to apprehend Agca, despite lengthy
stays in their countries and repeated Turkish protestations

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

nor killed. Writings and other items found in Agca's room and on his
person after his arrest would have helped incriminate and identify him,
even if he had escaped or been killed. On the whole there was nothing in
this operation that even hinted at the alleged professionalism of the
Soviet-Bloc intelligence services. Rather, the obvious amateurishness
of the assassination tactics fits far better an operation managed by Agca
and perhaps a few of his friends.

Operational ineptitude: (4) the Bulgarian involvement in Rome. The op-
erational weaknesses of the alleged Plot reached epic proportions after
Agca had declared that Bulgarian state officials met with him and
guided his movements in Rome. Proponents of the case would have us
believe that the Bulgarian secret service involved its agents in direct
contact, planning, and tactical maneuvers with Agca up to the moment
of the assassination attempt itself. Agca and two or three Bulgarians al-
legedly visited St. Peter's Square on each of the two days preceding the
assassination attempt in order to make the final plans. Not one but two
of the Bulgarians would allegedly drive Agca to the Square, and one
Bulgarian official would use smoke bombs to divert the crowd's atten-
tion so that Agca could get a good shot and/or make a getaway. This
would, of course, entail serious risk of a Bulgarian being arrested right
at the scene of the crime, the very thing that hiring a Turk with right-
wing credentials was supposed to avoid, according to the Sterling-
Henze model!

In his early declarations implicating the Bulgarians, Agca even
claimed that he visited Antonov and Aivazov in their homes in the Em-
bassy compound; and in one instance, just days before the assassination
attempt, he supposedly met Antonov's wife and young daughter. This
latter statement was subsequently "withdrawn," but this was not done
on the basis of scrutiny or ridicule on the part of the western press, nor
doubts and investigative efforts by Martella. The accumulated con-
tradictions and exposed lies, as we shall see, had simply become too
top-heavy to sustain.

The lag in Agca's confession. It took Agca more than 17 months after
his arrest to name his Bulgarian co-conspirators — six months after he
had agreed to "tell all." Investigating Magistrate Martella never
bothered to explain this long time lag. Sterling explained the delay as a
result of Agca's expectation that the Bulgarians and KGB would get him
out of prison. But she never indicated how the Bulgarians could do this

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

without admitting guilt and once again contradicting the logic of em-
ploying a rightwing assassin."

These weaknesses in the case were never overcome. The most inter-
esting questions, therefore, are why, by whom, and how so implausible,
undocumented, and internally contradictory a Plot was created and sus-
tained in the Italian courts and in the western press for a three-year
period.

The First Trial: Agca's Fast One of 1981

While there were immediate efforts to link the Soviets to the assassina-
tion attempt, when the Italian government brought Agca to trial in July
1981 any co-conspirators were assumed to have b«en fellow Turks and
members of the Gray Wolves. Yet little was revealed by the trial, and no
solid information about any possible conspiracy was forthcoming.

It is puzzling that the Italian authorities moved to try Agca so quickly,
before the investigation of a conspiracy could be completed. One possi-
ble explanation is that Italian authorities wished to have him convicted
and under their control, and feared that any delay would increase the
possibility that Agca would be found mentally incompetent to stand
trial. Media reports about Agca's childhood and Turkish background,
combined with his wild lies under interrogation, raised the possibility
that he was seriously deranged. Indeed, Agca's court-appointed
lawyer — Pietro d'Ovidio, a frequent defender of rightwing criminals —
asked the court to delay the trial until Turkish authorities could furnish
the court with copies of psychiatric examinations conducted at the time
of Agca's murder trial in 1979. The court ruled, however, that the con-
tents of these examinations (which had allegedly said that Agca was
medically competent to stand trial) were known through press reports,
and d'Ovidio's request was refused.

At the opening of his trial, Agca maintained that he acted alone. "I
did not want to talk to anyone about my plan to kill the Pope," he said.
"I acted independently, in the name of truth above ideologies. I do not
belong to any organization. International terrorism as I conceive it is not
concerned with ideology. It needs no idea. It needs a gun." 17 Shortly

16 This issue is discussed below in this chapter and in Chapter 6.

17 Cited in Paul Henze, The Plot To Kill the Pope (New York: Charles Scribner's

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

after making this statement Agca announced that he would take no more
part in the trial, and attempted to dismiss his lawyer. The prosecutor,
saying that "no one can understand or even guess the reason behind this
act," called Agca "the son of modem-day terrorism, that sinister afflic-
tion of our time," and described the assassination attempt as "symbolic
patricide . " 1 8 At the end of his three day trial , therefore , the jury deliber-
ated for six hours and sentenced Agca to life imprisonment. He would
be eligible for parole in 30 years.

The Court's decision, however, also observed that "the plea of guilty
by the accused must not close the case, since it is necessary still to ex-
plore certain aspects of the affair and to throw light on the background
from which a crime of this kind emerged."" Thus, when the Court is-
sued its full 51 -page "Statement of Motivation" on September 24,
1981, Agca was described as "only the visible point of a conspiracy
which, though impossible to define, was widespread and menacing and
devised by shadowy forces." The report described Agca's act as the
"fruit of a complex machination orchestrated by hidden minds inter-
ested in creating new conditions of destabilization. ' ' Despite the Court's
uncertainty over the precise relations between Agca and the Gray
Wolves — "which not even the Turkish authorities were able to render
intelligible" — the Statement of Motivation maintained that Agca was
"not a religious fanatic" but a disciplined and well-trained terrorist well
suited to carry out a "confidential task." "One must ask oneself,"
maintained the report, whether an organization which had broken Agca
out of prison and supported him financially and in other ways between
that time and the assassination attempt "would have permitted him to
take a personal initiative that was not in keeping with a common plan
worked out in advance in all its details." 2 "

Sons, 1985), p. 7. We are citing the revised paper edition. The original edition was pub-
lished in 1983.

18. Henry Tanner, "Italian Prosecutor Requests a Life Sentence for the Pope's Assail-
ant," New York Times, July 22, 1981; "Manic Motives," Newsweek, August 31, 1981,
p. 38.

19. Marietta Report, p. 9(1 1). In citing Judge Martella's unpublished Report, we use
two sets of page numbers. The first refers to the English-language translation made avail-
able to the authors by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a nongov-
ernmental organization in consultative status with UNESCO; the second, in parentheses,
refers to the original Italian version.

20. Henry Tanner, "Attack on Pope A Conspiracy, Court Says," New York Times,
September 25. 1981; and John Earle, "Pope 'Victim of Hidden Conspiracy,' " London
Times, September 25, 1981. The Court's Statement of Motivation was supported by, and

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

The Bulgarian Connection Emerges

The publication of the Statement of Motivation followed by three weeks
the airing of a British television program on the assassination attempt
which anticipated many of the ideas which were later developed as the
"Bulgarian Connection." The program was produced by Julian Man-
yon, a rightwing reporter for Thames Television's "TV Eye"; Paul
Henze served as a consultant. The broadcast claimed that the Pope was
shot because of his inspirational relationship to Poland's Solidarity, an
idea developed in the program primarily by Francesco Mazzola, the Ital-
ian junior minister in charge of the Italian security forces at the time of
the shooting. Mazzola noted that, at the time of the assassination at-
tempt, the Pope had recently met with Lech Walesa, and was about to
announce his return to Poland to administer the last rites to Cardinal
Wyszynski. According to Mazzola, the Soviets believed that such a visit
would produce a potentially dangerous series of anticommunist demon-
strations; and Mazzola maintained that the Vatican was convinced that
this was why the Pope had been shot.

The "TV Eye" program also extracted several items from Agca's
early declarations which were to re-emerge in Claire Sterling's Reader's
Digest article, "The Plot to Kill the Pope." It claimed that Agca stayed
in Bulgaria for 60 days, that his contact there with one Omer Mersan
helped him to obtain his forged Turkish passport, and that Mersan intro-
duced him to a mysterious "Mustafa Eof. " According to Mazzola,
Mustafa Eof was Agca's contact with the Bulgarian secret service and
supplied Agca with money, documentation, and instructions. Eof sup-
posedly met Agca again in Tunis, where he had fled following the mur-
der of a Turkish Gray Wolves leader in West Germany. Mazzola main-
tained that Eof directed Agca's apparently random wanderings through-
out Western Europe, which were all somehow directed toward the at-
tack on the Pope." The only evidence presented by Mazzola, Manyon,

probably drew on, a report by (he anti-terrorist police force DIGOS, dated September 15,
198 1 . This report summarized information gathered up to that point on Agca's travels and
associations, and traced the history of the assassination weapon from its Belgium man-
ufacturer to an Austria gun dealer (Marietta Report, pp. 9-16(12-18).) Claire Sterling, in
her account of the Statement of Motivation in The Time of the Assassins, neglects to men-
tion that it connects Agca with the Gray Wolves.

21 Michael Knipe, "West Germans Now Believe KGB Inspired Attack on Pope,"

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

or anyone else that a conspiracy existed, however, was a photograph
showing a figure fleeing from the Square, supposedly in the moments
just following the assassination attempt. 22 Agca subsequently identified
this individual as a Bulgarian, and still later as his Turkish friend Oral
Celik, but never as Mustafa Eof. The latter has disappeared from sight,
and may reasonably be presumed to have been a figment of Agca's
imagination.

The Martella Investigation. The Court's conclusion that Agca had been
part of a conspiracy returned the case to the Public Prosecutor; and on
November 7, 1981 , the Prosecutor appointed Magistrate Ilario Martella
to conduct the investigation. 23 In accordance with Italian law, Martella
was given broad powers of investigation during this, the "Instruction
Phase" of the legal proceedings against Agca "and persons unknown. "
His function might be compared to that of a Grand Jury in the United
States, in that he was not constricted by formal rules of evidence and
there was no burden of proof on the prosecution. Like a Grand Jury, the
Instruction Phase is supposed to be secret. The examining magistrate is
also supposed to pursue lines of investigation that would demonstrate
the innocence, as well as the guilt, of the accused. Finally, the Instruc-
tion Phase culminates in a decision whether there is sufficient evidence
to bring the accused to trial. 24

Martella began his investigation by re-interviewing the witnesses to
the assassination attempt and by asking a team of forensic experts to in-
vestigate how many bullets had been fired. These efforts revealed little
new information. The forensic experts concluded that one pistol had
fired two bullets. 2 ' The eyewitnesses apparently had little to add to their

London Times, September 5, 1981.

22. This photograph, taken by Lowell Newton, is discussed below

23 For a fuller treatment of Martella's handling of the Bulgarian Connection case, see

Chapter 5, pp. I 14-21

24. G. Leroy Certoma, The Italian Le gal System (London: Butterworth, 1985), p. 219;

cited in International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Report of the International

Commission of Study and Information on "The Anlonov Affair" (Brussels: May 13,

1985), pp 7-8.

25 Martella Report, pp 22-27(25-30) Martella eventually concluded that a second
gunman must have fired a third bullet. While there was disagreement among the witnesses
as to how many bullets were fired, Martella never explained why he overruled his forensic
experts in deciding that there must have been three bullets fired. It was this conclusion,
and the equally shaky conclusion that Agca had fired only two bullets, which led Martella
to state in his final Report that Agca had been accompanied by a second gunman on the

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

trial testimony, although Lowell Newton, the U.S. photographer who
had taken the picture of a man running away from St. Peter's Square im-
mediately after the shooting, who he said was carrying a gun, provided
a detailed description of Agca's apparent accomplice. 26

We now come to a critical period in the fabrication of the Bulgarian
Connection. According to Martella's Report, sometime in late April
1982 Agca told the prison authorities that he wished to make a state-
ment. The "new Agca" was suddenly voluble and cooperative, giving
Martella for the first time plausible testimony on some of his Gray
Wolves associates and connections." Most significantly, Agca began to
bring the Bulgarians into his story, at first incidentally and tentatively,
but later moving them to the front of the stage.

Why did Agca suddenly decide to talk? On this question Martella's
Report is silent, implying that Agca had simply decided to cooperate
and tell "the truth. " Claire Sterling and others committed to the validity
of the Bulgarian Connection maintain that Agca decided to talk because
he realized that his hopes of being rescued from prison by the Bulgar-

day of the assassination attempt. This unexamined aspect of Martella's Report, of course,
provided the media with its headlines and lead paragraphs when the Report was released
in late October 1984. The effect of this was to reinforce, if only subliminally, support for
a Bulgarian Connection, even though the second gunman was presumed to be the Gray
Wolves leader. Oral Celik, not one of the Bulgarians.

26. Martella Report, pp. 19-21 (22-24). According to Newton, the man ran towards and
past him. carrying a gun in front of him. Newton, who said he wailed for the man to run
past him before using his camera, later "pointed out a def inite resemblance" betwaen the
running man and a photograph of Celik, according to a letter he later sent to Martella in
April 1984. Soon after his original deposition for Martella, however, Newton had iden-
tified the man in the Square as identical to one AM Chafic," whose picture was circu-
lated as a composite drawing by the Reagan administration after the "Libyan hit squad"
furor in November 1981 . ("Conspiracy to Kill the Pope," Time, January 1 1 , 1982, p. 31;
and James Coates, "FBI Probes Libyan Link to Pope Attack." Chicago Tribune, January
10, 1982.) It was later discovered that this secret official U.S. list of "Libyan hit squad"
members included Nabih Bern and the names of other prominent members of the
Lebanese Shiite party Amal and aging Lebanese parliamentarians; but this information
was suppressed in the United Slates. See Duncan Campbell and Patrick Forbes. New
Statesman, August 16, 1985.

27 Exactly how valuable this information was is hard to determine. Martella's Report
only occasionally contains actual quotations from his interviews with Agca. More typi-
cally it offers summaries and reconstructions of Agca's responses to his questions In light
of the complete breakdown of Agca as a useful witness during the trial that began in May
1985, the accuracy of Martella's Report in even correctly reconstructing Agca's state-
ments is seriously open to question. It seems very likely that Martella sifted from Agca's
changing and conflicting statements a more-or-less logical version of what might have
happened. Thus Martella's Report must be used with caution in reconstructing even the
flow of the investigation.

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

ians — either in a jail break, through a prisoner exchange, or by being
ransomed — would not be fulfilled. 28

On the other hand, in December 1982, immediately after the arrest of
the Bulgarian Antonov, a mass of details and allegations were published
in the Italian press strongly suggesting that Agca was pressured or
bribed to "confess." Martella's Report is notable for its failure to ex-
plore the possibility that Agca was coached; and, as we will see in
Chapter 5, Martella was an important part of the machinery of an in-
duced confession.

What and when did Agca tell Martella about his alleged Bulgarian co-
conspirators? Throughout his "confessions" during the first week in
May there was apparently only a single reference to Bulgarian coopera-
tion. According to Martella's Report, sometime in early 1981 Agca con-
tacted a Syrian in Sofia who had earlier attempted to help out with his
passport difficulties. A few days later, Agca told Martella, they met in
Vienna and, "during a meeting held in the presence of a Bulgarian dip-
lomat named Petronov, [the Syrian] not only gave Agca the sum of
100,000 Austrian schillings but promised him that, if he managed to or-
ganize some terrorist attack against the European Parliament, NATO, or
the Common Market, he would receive in return unconditional hospital-
ity in Syria, Bulgaria, or East Germany." 29

Agca's wild tale of a meeting in the presence of a mythical Bulgarian
diplomat named "Petronov" was the only time that any charge of Bul-
garian cooperation was recorded by Martella until late October 1982. 30
Then, under questioning about his companion or companions in St.

28 On December 20, 1981 , Agca began a hunger strike thai lasted for 10 days Claire
Sterling is fond of pointing out that Agca was repeating the Turkish scenario of 1979, dur-
ing his trial for the murder of the Turkish newspaper editor Abdi Ipekci. That is, Agca's
hunger strike was a "signal" to the Bulgarians to release him "or else," and when a suit-
able period of time had gone by Agca began to talk, as he had earlier threatened to do in
Turkey before he was broken out of prison (For a critique of Sterling's "signaling"
theory, see Chapter 6, pp 1 38-40.) Sterling and company also advanced the hypothesis
that Agca began to talk when he was confronted with the "information" that his alleged
Bulgarian co-conspirators intended to have him killed in St Peter's Square, but bungled
the job. This was also the conclusion of La Siampa, which reported that "What convinced
[AgcaJ to talk were the conclusions of the investigators . who found out that Agca's
accomplices, if the killer made it out safe and sound from St. Peter's Square, were going
to eliminate him instead of bringing him to safety across the border." "Pressure on Agca
Reported," Philadelphia Inquirer [UPI], December 8, 1982.

29. Martella Report, p. 45(50).

30. On January 27, 1 984. Agca admitted to Martella that his story about Petronov was a
figment of his imagination. This means that before October 1 982 Agca had not named a
single nonfictional Bulgarian in all of his extensive interrogations. Martella Report, pp.
407(534-35)

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Peter's Square on May 13, Agca suddenly began to tell Martella about
his Bulgarian co-conspirators. And a week later Agca picked three Bul-
garians out of a photo album, telling Martella that these were the men
who organized the assassination attempt on the Pope and assisted him
on the day of the assassination attempt itself. Was this, again, simply a
matter of Agca finally deciding to tell the "truth"? Or had something
happened in the interim to persuade Agca not only to continue talking
but to talk about the Bulgarians?

Art Anticipates Reality. Indeed, much had happened between the
"new" Agca's confessions of May and those of late October. Most im-
portant, in the interim Claire Sterling had published her article in the
Reader's Digest arguing that Agca was acting on behalf of the Bulga-
rians, and NBC-TV had broadcast its special "white paper," "The Man
Who Shot the Pope: A Study in Terrorism." While neither of these ef-
forts contributed any new information, they sketched a model of a
"Bulgarian Connection" which was adopted and embroidered on by
Agca.

Sterling's article, "The Plot To Murder The Pope," was published in
the September issue of the Reader's Digest, which reached subscribers
in mid-August. Despite the many lies and contradictions in Agca's
evolving confessions, Sterling's Reader's Digest article relied heavily
on Agca's May 1981 declarations that he had been trained at a Syrian/
PLO camp in Lebanon, and that his primary political connections in
Turkey were with the Left and not the Right. Both in the Reader's Di-
gest and later. Sterling maintained that whatever links Agca had with
the Gray Wolves were a cover for his real, leftist sympathies. Sterling
found the chief link between Agca and the Bulgarians in the Turkish
smuggler Abuzer Ugurlu, who she claimed worked hand-in-glove with
Bulgarian authorities. Sterling also introduced Ugurlu's associate Omer
Mersan, who was later to tell an Italian court that he had given $770 to
Agca (who he knew under another name) at Ugurlu's behest. Out of
these "links" Sterling created a chain of command by which the Bulga-
rians induced their agent Ugurlu to hire Agca to shoot the Pope.

Five weeks after Sterling's story reached the public, NBC-TV broad-
cast "The Man Who Shot the Pope: A Study in Terrorism." The pro-
gram, which was narrated by Marvin Kalb, employed Sterling and Paul
Henze as consultants. While many of its points had already been made
by Sterling, perhaps the chief characteristic of the report was its stress
on the Soviet's motive in shooting the Pope. According to NBC, the

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

Pope posed a threat to the Soviets because of his support for Solidarity
and Polish nationalism, and more particularly from his alleged warning
to the Soviet leadership that an invasion of Poland would cause him to
lay down his crown and join the Polish resistance. While this claim has
never been supported by any evidence, and has been consistently re-
futed by Vatican spokesmen, 31 the Pope's alleged threat to the Soviets
was the heart of the NBC case. Like the earlier "TV Eye" program,
NBC relied heavily on former Italian Security Minister Mazzola to sup-
port the plausibility of such risky (and foolish) action by the Soviets.
And, as in Sterling's Reader's Digest article, the program stated that
Agca had been recruited by the KGB before he ever left his hometown,
and that his subsequent association with the Right in Turkey was only a
cover for his real commitment to the Left. The mass of detail which
showed that Agca had been assisted by this rightwing network of Turks
in the two years before shooting the Pope was thus dismissed as irrele-
vant, because if Agca had already been recruited by the KGB , the right-
wing network also must have been manipulated by the Soviets and their
agents. Finally, the NBC program concluded with the interesting obser-
vation that a Soviet plot against the Pope was not without precedent, cit-
ing as examples the U.S. plots against Lumumba, Castro, and "possi-
bly" Qaddafi!

One significant U.S. follow-up to the NBC program was the hearing
held by the congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in
Europe on September 23, 1982, two days after the NBC broadcast. The
Commission, which had been established to oversee Soviet compliance
with the Helsinki Accords, heard Claire Sterling, Michael Ledeen, and
Bulgarian emigre Atanas Slavov. The Commissioners were unanimous
in their certainty that the Bulgarians and the Soviets were behind the
Plot. Claire Sterling outlined for the Committee the version of the assas-
sination plot which she had recently written for Reader's Digest. She
implied that great significance lay in the fact that Solidarity and the
Polish government ratified the Gdansk agreement on August 3 1 , 1980,
the same day that Agca left Bulgaria for Western Europe. She also told
the Committee that no one from any of the U.S. intelligence agencies
had discussed her findings with her."

3 1 . See Chapter 7, p. 200.

32. The hearing was apparently held at the urging of Commission member Representa-
tive Donald Ritter of Pennsylvania. A guest at the hearing was Senator Alfonse D' Amato
of New York, who declared that (a) he had talked with the monsignor in the Vatican who
had delivered the alleged message from the Pope to the Soviet Union; (b) the Vatican was

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

The most significant outcome of the efforts of Sterling and NBC was
to frame the case in Italy itself. On October 5 Judge Martella flew to
Washington, according to the Washington Post, "in hope of evaluating
two recent U.S. media reports suggesting that Soviet Bloc intelligence
agencies were involved." Martella told a Post reporter that, while no
hard evidence existed linking the eastern Bloc to the plot, "he could not
rule out the possibility." According to the Post, Martella "has asked
the Justice Department to help him obtain meetings with persons famil-
iar with the case including, possibly, the journalists responsible for the
NBC and Reader's Digest articles. ' '" He is known to have met with Ar-
naud de Borchgrave and to have been given a special viewing of the
NBC-TV program on the Plot Against the Pope.

On October 29, according to Martella's Report, the interrogation of
Agca was renewed. Martella asked Agca about the reports of several
witnesses, supported by the Lowell Newton photograph, that Agca had
been assisted by at least one other person in St. Peter's Square on the
day of the shooting. Agca readily volunteered the information that
"there was in fact another person . . . , namely the Bulgarian citizen
Sotir Kolev'' who had been introduced to him in Sofia "as an expert on
terrorism in Europe." Shortly after several meetings with Kolev, Agca
told Martella, his companion Oral Celik arrived in Sofia. His coming,
according to Agca, was determined "by the opportunity to plan terrorist
acts in Europe, using the 'Gray Wolves' in the interests of countries
within the Soviet sphere such as Bulgaria." The most important such
act, according to Agca, was a projected assassination of the Pope.

According to Martella's Report, on the day that Agca first named his
Bulgarian contact, " Kolev," he placed him at the center of an elaborate
conspiracy which would net him and his gang over a million dollars in
exchange for killing the Pope. The money would be paid into Celik 's
bank account by Turkish businessman Bekir Celenk. 34 One-third of this

convinced that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination; (c) he had told this to the
CIA on October 19, 1981: and (d) he had met with Claire Sterling immediately after his
return from Italy "and began to compare some notes." ("The Assassination Attempt on
Pope John Paul II," Hearing Before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in
Europe, 97th Congress, 2nd Session [September 23, 1982], p. 12.) At the hearing Senator
Patrick Leahy of Vermont said that, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he
had been briefed by the CIA about the possible Soviet role in the papal assassination at-
tempt on more than one occasion (p. 3), though no dates were given.

33. Robert J. McCartney, "Plodding Inquiry Studies Bulgarian Link," Washington
Post, October 6, 1982.

34. Despite Agca's claim that it was actually paid and was thus presumably traceable.

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

sum would go to Musa Celebi's Western European network of Gray
Wolves in exchange for the support they would provide Agca and his
companions; and it was Celebi who supposedly telephoned Agca the go-
ahead signal at the end of April 1981. Meanwhile "Kolev," according
to plan, arrived in Rome at the beginning of May to supervise last-
minute operations. Together he and Agca cased the Square, and
"Kolev" made arrangements for Agca to stay at a guest house under the
name of Ozgun. On the following day "Kolev" pointed out another
Bulgarian — "Bayramic" — who was to assist Agca in escaping after the
assassination.

The most significant step in Agca's identification of the Bulgarians
came a week later. On November 8 Agca was shown a photograph
album of 56 Bulgarians living in Rome since 1977. He was asked if any
of the people in the photos were "Kolev" or "Bayramic." Agca im-
mediately identified the first photograph as that of "Kolev," and the
second as "Bayramic."" Agca then went on to identify the person in
photograph number 20 as "Petrov," a military attache at the Bulgarian
Embassy. "I admit that I have not so far referred to this person in order
not to worsen my case," Agca told Martella, saying that he had no cor-
roborating evidence. But Agca then stated that he had known "Petrov"
since November 1980, having been given the Embassy telephone
number by Celenk in Sofia in August. 36

this money has never been located in the course of four years of Italian official investiga-
tions. During the Rome trial, also, Yalcin Ozbey, a member of the Gray Wolves and close
friend of Agca, testified on September 20, 1985, that Celik had visited him in West Ger-
many, and had not only failed to mention the receipt of any money, but even had to bor-
row from Ozbey for current expenses.

35. Later, on June 28, 1983, Agca stated that, at the time of his identification of
' * Bayramic . " he did not know that his real name was Antonov or that Antonov worked for
Balkan Air. But when it was "recorded that the person I recognised as 'Bayramic' was
Sergei Antonov, employed at the 'Balkan Air,' not only did I declare falsely that I
knew the real occupation of Bayramic, but also that I knew by heart the two telephone
numbers of Balkan Air. " Agca then went on to declare that he had learned these telephone
numbers when Martella briefly steppad out of the room and he was able to consult a tele-
phone directory. Marietta Report, pp. 372-73(486-87).

36. When he first mentioned Celenk to Martella in May 1982, Agca had said that "he
had not talked directly with Celenk" but had only seen him and had him identified at a
distance. Subsequently, Agca read Mumcu's book Arms Smuggling and Terrorism, in
which Celenk was a featured performer. The Turkish journalist Orsan Oymen points out
that following his reading of this new source, Agca related episodes from Mumcu's book
in the form "I was told by Celenk" that such-and-such had occurred! Martella never
caught on to this process. See Orsan Oymen, "Behind the Scenes of the 'Agca Investiga-

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

With the insights gained from his visit to Washington and Agca's
identification of Bulgarians," Martella requested warrants for the arrest
of Sergei Antonov (' ' Bayramic") and the military attache Jelio Vassilev
("Petrov"). He also directed that proceedings be started against the dip-
lomat Todor Aivazov ("Kolev"), who was protected by diplomatic im-
munity.

Although both Aivazov and Vassilev had already returned to Bul-
garia, apparently as part of a routine rotation, Antonov was arrested at
his office on November 25. His home was searched and a "guide to the
Vatican" was confiscated. The next day the interrogation of the in-
credulous Antonov was begun, with Martella quizzing him about each
of Agca's statements concerning "Bayramic": Did he like flowers? Did
he collect miniature liquor bottles? Et cetera. Martella's investigation of
Antonov and his alibi, which occupies much of the remaining 1 ,000
pages of his Report, reflects his belief that any contradictions in An-
tonov 's testimony or any lapses in his memory after 18 months about
where he was and what he was doing in May 1981 were indicative of
Bulgarian guilt. Similarly, any shifts or contradictions in the testimonies
of those Antonov claimed could vouch for his whereabouts at key times
were seen by Martella as signs of connivance among the defense wit-
nesses to get their story straight.

While Martella's investigation largely degenerated into mere alibi
checking following the arrest of Antonov, the sensational news that the
Soviet Bloc had been implicated in the papal assassination attempt
shifted the locus of the case out of the investigators' offices and back to
the mass media, which swung behind the new story with only marginal
reservations. The shift in tone of western media coverage as a result of
Agca's declarations and the arrest of Antonov is well illustrated by the
changes made in the NBC program, "The Man Who Shot the Pope,"
rebroadcast in the one-hour slot before President Reagan's "State of the
Union" message on January 25, 1983. information about Agca's Tur-
kish roots was almost entirely deleted, and the sole concern of the pro-
gram was to present — with a supportive framework and completely un-
critically — Agca's declarations that the Bulgarians had done it. What-

lion,' " Milliyel, November 1984.

37. We show in Chapter 5 thai the photo albums were almost certainly shown to Agca
prior to the identification parade of November 8. 1982. We will see, also, that the photos
allegedly showing Bulgarians on the scene on May 1 3 were misidentified by Agca (the
Lowell Newton photo of the flseing person) or probably fabricated by a source not yet
identified (the photo showing Antonov in the Square)

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

ever tentativeness the earlier program had contained the rebroadcast de-
leted. And where the original program had concluded with the some-
what startling point that a Soviet-backed conspiracy was conceivable
because of earlier U.S. assassination plots against Castro and
Lumumba, the rebroadcast dropped this point and concluded with a
ringing warning that the failure of western governments, particularly the
United States, to pursue the case aggressively wherever it might lead
was tantamount to treason. "The Reagan administration," intoned Mar-
vin Kalb, "is etching no profile in courage, allowing Italy to stand alone
against the fury of the Soviet Union." For the Reagan administration,
and particularly for the CIA, proof of Soviet guilt "could shatter hopes
for detente, trade, and arms agreements." "The continuing investiga-
tion," concluded Kalb, "has the potential of a time bomb ticking away
in a comer of East-West relations." 38

The Baroque Era of the Bulgarian Connection

Once Agca had begun to talk about "Kolev" and the Bulgarian Connec-
tion, there suddenly seemed no end to the "Connections" which he
could reveal. He claimed to have been sent by the Bulgarians on a sur-
veillance mission to Malta and Tunisia to check out whether it would be
feasible to assassinate their heads of state, Dom Mintoff and Habib
Bourguiba. He spoke of spying in Switzerland and of plotting to kill
Lech Walesa. His testimony also linked the plot to kill the Pope to on-
going investigations into Bulgarian state involvement with smuggling 39
and with the Red Brigades. Each of these alleged plots, complex in
themselves and resting often on Agca's testimony alone, "confirmed"
each other through repetition and through their sensational treatment by
the mass media. The media also developed their own information from
intelligence agencies and defectors to help forward the chorus of a Bul-
garian Connection. 40 The cumulative effect of all this was to consolidate
western belief in the truth of the Bulgarian Connection. Yet the support
given by these tangential plots and scandals to the basic claims was only

38. " The Man Who Shot the Pope: A Study of Terrorism. Update. " January 25, 1983.
8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Official transcript, pp. 61-62.

39. We take up this thread of investigation-propaganda in Chapter 3 and Appendix B

40. Sse the discussion in Chapter 7 of the "Mantarov Connection" developed by the
New York Times.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

atmospheric, producing no real evidence to strengthen Judge Martella's
case.

The ' 'Plot" to Kill Lech Walesa. By far the most important of the sec-
ondary plots that emerged out of Agca's testimony was the alleged con-
spiracy to kill Lech Walesa. Agca first mentioned such a plot on
November 8, 1982. But the issue apparently was not investigated in
depth until December 29, 1982, when he was interrogated by magis-
trates Priore and Imposimato, who were conducting further inquiries
into the case of the Red Brigades and one of their leaders, Agca's prison
neighbor Giovanni Senzani. Once again Agca was shown the album of
56 photographs, and once again he identified his three Bulgarian co-
conspirators. On this occasion, however, "Agca not only recognised
the same photographs that he had identified before . . . , but he also
stated that he recognised in photo no. 8 Mr. Ivan Tomov." 41 According
to the Martella Report, Agca told the magistrates: 42

During our meetings Ivan Tomov and Kolev expounded to us a plan to kill
Walesa when he came to Italy. According to this plan I was supposed to take
part in the murder of Walesa using a pistol or a remote-controlled plastic bomb.
Ivan Tomov and Kolev told me that the choice of which method to use would
depend on information that would certainly come from Italian trade unionists
who were close to Walesa — people who were in contact with them and who
could supply them with all the necessary details about Walesa's itinerary.

In a further interview on February 4, 1983, Agca again stated that he
had plotted with the three Bulgarians indicted in the papal conspiracy
and with the Bulgarian Dontchev ("Ivan Tomov" 's real name) to kill
Walesa in January 1981 . Again Agca repeated details of their prepara-
tions and of the spots chosen for the assassination. But now he stated
that the plans were canceled "because [Dontchev] told us that he had
learned from an Italian trade unionist whose name I don't know that the
Italian Secret Service had by now received the 'information' of a possi-
ble assassination attempt against Walesa. ' '" Martella questioned Agca

41. Manella Report, p. 132(181-82).

42. Ibid., pp. 132-33(182-83)

43. Ibid., pp. 358-59(467-68). The "Italian trade unionist" in question was undoubted-
ly Luigi Scricciolo. The "Scricciolo Affair" remains among the murkiest aspects of the
Bulgarian Connection. Scricciolo had been arrested in February 1982 and charged with
being an accessory in the kidnapping of General James Dozier, who had been held by the
Red Brigades for six weeks, from mid-December 1981 to late January 1 982, before being
rescued by the Italian police But while allegedly spying for Bulgaria, Scricciolo had
worked closely with the AFL-CIO. arranging for Solidarity delegates to attend two meet-

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

on this subject again on February 1 1 , and a week later sent a recommen-
dation to the Attorney General of the Court of Appeal in Rome that in-
dictments be issued in this alleged conspiracy. After some jurisdictional
juggling, Martella's investigation into the conspiracy to murder Walesa
was renewed in mid-April.*'

Then, somewhat mysteriously, came Agca's "Retraction" of June
28, 1983. In that part of Agca's retraction concerning the Walesa plot,
Agca maintained that he had never met Dontchev, and that the details
which he gave to Judge Imposimato on December 29, 1982 concerning
the plot had been learned from listening to Imposimato read portions of
the testimony of an indicted trade unionist — Luigi Scricciolo — to Judge
Priore. He also said that he was able to pick out Dontchev from the
photo album because Imposimato showed him Dontchev' s picture and
said, "This is Ivan Tomov, Scricciolo's friend, do you recognise him?"
While Agca continued to maintain that he and his papal co-conspirators
discussed killing Walesa, he now said the plot never went anywhere.

On August 23 Martella charged Agca with slander against himself
and the others. During his examination of September 15, 1983, Agca
admitted that he had lied — "in order to make my declarations more
credible." 45 But Martella persisted in pressing Agca on how he knew so
many details, because none of them was contained in any of Scric-
ciolo's interrogations prior to December 29; and so even if Judge Im-
posimato had read portions of these interrogations to Judge Priore in
Agca's presence, Agca could not have learned the details to which he
confessed at that time. 46

There the matter has rested. Agca has maintained rather lamely that
he was able to lie in such detail because his interrogators asked him
questions in a yes-or-no fashion and he was able to make lucky guesses.

ings at the U.S. Embassy, one with a U.S. diplomat and a second with an assistant to
AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland . (For a warm letter of solidarity to Scricciolo from AFL-
CIO representative Irving Brown, see Christian Roulette, La Filiere: Jean-Paul II, An-
lonov. Agca (Paris: Editions du Sorbier, 1984), p. 265.) His later confessions of involve-
ment with the Bulgarians in spying and in negotiations with the Red Brigades fed well into
the ongoing Bulgarian Connection publicity. Scricciolo's involvement in the alleged
Walesa plot remains obscure. He supposedly told investigators thai he knew of such a
plot, and Agca later claimed to have obtained many details about the plot from hearing
Scricciolo's earlier testimony on the matter. While Scricciolo is still in jail and awaiting
trial, it is significant that Martella dropped all charges against Agca, Scricciolo, and the
Bulgarians tor involvement in the Walesa plot

44. Martella Report, p. 367(479).

45. Ibid., p. 377(492-93).

46. Sterling, op. cit., n. 1. pp 242-43.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Claire Sterling maintains — still — that Agca was able to provide details
of the alleged plot against Walesa because the plot was real and Agca's
initial declarations were true. Others — including the authors — believe
that Agca was able to provide his detailed description because he was
coached while he was in prison, an argument which we develop in
Chapter 5. As for Scricciolo, whether he was a Bulgarian spy, a double
agent, or none of the above, his case and his declarations served to give
credibility to Agca's primary claims: that he was hired by Bulgaria to
kill the Pope.

The Case Starts to Unravel

The Walesa plot, and Agca's claims of Bulgarian sponsorship of trips
hither and yon to scout out assassination possibilities, took a toll on the
credibility of the Bulgarian Connection, although the western media
succeeded in keeping these matters very low key. The most serious
damage, however, resulted from a growing list of Agca's "retractions"
of previously key claims in his story. The first retraction came in De-
cember 1982, after Aivazov and Vassilev held a press conference in
Sofia to deny Agca's allegations. At this press conference it was obvi-
ous to the assembled reporters, based on distinctive physical character-
istics, that Aivazov (' 'Kolev") could not have been the character shown
running away from the Square in the Lowell Newton photograph of May
13, 1981. Three days after the press conference Agca recanted his claim
that Kolev had been the person in the Square.

The most significant retraction concerned Agca's claim that he had
visited Antonov's apartment just a few days before the assassination at-
tempt, and that while there he had met Antonov's wife and young
daughter. This touch added seeming veracity to Agca's story, be-
cause — if true — it showed that he was on very familiar terms with at
least one of the alleged co-conspirators. On the other hand, Agca's
claim seemed wildly improbable in the context of a carefully con-
structed plot, as it violated in the extreme the cardinal rule of "plausible
deniability."

Antonov's defense team was able to assemble documentary evidence
that Antonov's wife and daughter had left Rome several days before the
time when Agca said that he had met them. Soon after news reports of
the alibis of Mrs. Antonov and her daughter had appeared, Agca again

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

adjusted his story. In an interview with Judge Martella on June 28,
1983, Agca admitted to having lied about three crucial points. First, he
stated that he had never met Antonov's wife and daughter, as he had
claimed earlier. Second, he now said that he had never visited An-
tonov's apartment at all. As in the case of his claims about Mrs. An-
tonov, Agca's apparent ability to describe Antonov's apartment had
added weight to his more general claims. But a telling error in his de-
scription — his claim that Antonov's apartment was divided by a folding
door, present in other apartments in the building, but which had been re-
moved from Antonov's apartment before Agca's alleged visit — not only
led to this particular retraction but also added strength to the charge
that Agca had been coached. Finally, Agca admitted that he had never
met the Bulgarian Dontchev, though he continued to maintain that he
had discussed assassinating Lech Walesa with Antonov and the other
Bulgarians. Once again, Agca's ability to describe Dontchev, whom he
now admitted he had never met, raised questions about coaching.

Although Agca's retractions would seem on their face to be of great
importance in assessing the truth of the Bulgarian Connection, Italian
authorities and the mass media kept these facts (which would have
called into serious question the Sterling-Henze party line) almost com-
pletely under wraps for more than a year. In late September 1983 an
item by Henry Kamm appeared in the New York Times saying that "Ital-
ians May Charge Turk With Slander of Jailed Bulgarian." 47 The article
noted that Antonov's lawyer had not been notified of the nature of the
slander. After reviewing some of the apparent weaknesses in Agca's
story, Kamm concluded that "It could not be learned whether these
were the reasons for the reported decision to indict Mr. Agca for slan-
der." In late November a small item in the Times, reporting that An-
tonov's lawyer was going to sue Agca for slander, quoted the attorney
as saying he had been told that Mattel la's charge against Agca con-
cerned the alleged plot against Walesa. 48 It was not until June 1984,
nearly a year after the retraction took place, that the leaking of the Al-
bano Report brought them into the public domain. 49

Claire Sterling maintains that Agca's retraction was false, being
prompted by the kidnapping of Emmanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a

47. New York Times, September 30, 1983.

48. "Pope's Attacker, Accused of Slandering Bulgarian, To Be Sued," New York
Times [AP), November 26, 1983

49 The New York Times, the original vehicle of this release, kept the retraction under
cover for a much longer time; see Chapter 7, pp. 1 90-94.

Mil'. Ill II < IAKIAN ( I INNI ( 1 1( )N

Vatican official. This kidnapping took place on June 22, 1983, and was
reported in the press four days later. Agca's retractions were made to
Judge Martella on June 28, two days after the press reports. "The kid-
napping may have convinced him," wrote Sterling, "that his Turkish or
Bulgarian accomplices were trying to get him out of prison." 50 But
Sterling's interpretation is not only far-fetched, it disregards some rele-
vant facts." First, demands for Agca's release were not made public
until someone claiming to be one of the kidnappers called both the Vati-
can and ANSA, the Italian news agency, on July 6. The caller to ANSA
said that "some days ago we had contact with a Vatican secretary, a
message that the Vatican has hidden." 52 Thus Agca's retraction pre-
ceded, rather than followed, the kidnappers' announcement that Em-
manuela was being held until Agca was released. Second, if Agca's re-
tractions were made in order to influence his would-be liberators, he
must have assumed that they had an informer in Judge Martella's office,
for, as we noted above, these retractions were largely unknown for al-
most a year after they were made. Moreover, when he was given an op-
portunity for a brief exchange with the press just after Emmanuela's kid-
napping, Agca repeatedly stated that he had been trained by the KGB
and the "Bulgarian secret services" for his assassination attempt, and
shouted that "I refuse any exchange." 53 Finally, while the Italian police
received hundreds of hoax calls from people claiming to be her kidnap-
pers, the police consistently credited the kidnapping to a group calling
itself the "Turkish Anti-Christian Liberation Front." A call from the
group to the Italian newspaper // Messaggero demanded that Gray

50 "Agca recanted pari of his testimony about the purported plot on Mr. Walesa
on June 28, 1983, as soon as he could after he found out about a kidnapping of the daugh-
ter of a Vatican employee " Claire Sterling, "Agca's Other Story: The Plot to Kill
Walesa," New York Times, October 27, 1984.

51 For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 6, pp 138-40

52. "Caller: Have Girl; Agca Must Be Free," Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 1983.
Another article said that the caller told Italian news agencies that he had contacted the Vat-
ican after the Pope's first appeal for Emmanuela's release, which was made on July 3.
("Pope John Paul Pledges Support for Efforts to Find Missing Teenager," Philadelphia
Inquirer, July II, 1983.)

53. "Agca Asserts KGB Aided in Pope Plot." New York Times, July 9. 1983. As the
Washington Post noted, both U.S. and Italian observers were convinced that Agca's infor-
mal press conference was "not accidental." (Sari Gilbert, "Hoax Calls Regarding Agca
Bedevil Italian Officials," July 13, 1983.) The Italians' actions were denounced by both
the Bulgarians and the Soviets. Agca's remarks — that he had been trained by the KGB,
that he had been trained in Syria and Bulgaria, and that the Bulgarians and Antonov were
guilty — were featured on all three U S television networks.

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

Wolves leader Celebi, as well as Agca, be released. 54 While the evi-
dence is thin, it suggests that if the kidnappers had any real link at all
with Agca — something which the police increasingly came to doubt —
ihey were probably part of the Gray Wolves network."

Agca's impromptu press conference was but the first of a series of
events following his June 28 retractions which served both to keep the
alleged Bulgarian Connection before the public eye and to mask the
growing weaknesses of the case. The publication in late 1983 of Ster-
ling's The Time of the Assassins and of Henze's The Plot to Kill the
Pope, which were received with generally respectful if not enthusiastic
reviews, were given wide recognition and served to restate the case of
the disinformationists." A similar effect was achieved by the publicity
given to Agca's two-hour reenactment of his supposed movements in
and around St. Peter's Square on the day of the assassination attempt.
This mini-drama, which occurred on October 18, was followed on
November 7 by a similar exercise in which Agca was taken to the street
on which the Bulgarian Aivazov had lived, in order to see if Agca could
identify Aivazov's house. The fact that he could not do so did not de-
tract from the public-relations effect of the exercise, which was to re-
vive media interest in the alleged plot." The Bulgarian Connection re-

54. "Call to Rome Paper is Lalesl Kidnap Clue," Philadelphia Inquirer (UPI], July
23, 1983.

55. Sari Gilbert of the Washington Post noted that DIGOS, the Italian anti-terrorist
police, turned the case over to the homicide squad on July 1 1 , and that the investigation
was "now concentrating on the possibility thai the demands regarding Agca are probably
a cover-up for something else, ranging from murder to a secret romantic elopement"
("Hoax Calls Regarding Agca Bedevil Italian Officials," Washington Post, July 13,
1983). A month later, however, UPI reported that Italian magistrates were investigating
the possibility that the KGB had organized the kidnapping to discredit the Pope." "Rome
Said to Suspect KGB Role in Abduction," New York Times, August 1 1 , 1983.

56. See, for example, Edward J. Epstein, "Did Agca Act Alone?" New York Times
Book Review, January 15, 1984, pp. 6-7; Gordon Crovitz, "The Bulgarian Connection,"
Wall Street Journal, February 3, 1984, p. 20. A mass market version of the pre-confes-
sion Sterling-Henze line appeared in mid-1983, with the publication of Pontiff, by Gordon
Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company,
1983). Pontiff was serialized in a number of newspapers. As we have pointed out else-
where, the use of evidence in this study is so appalling that none of its conclusions can be
taken seriously. See "The Press, the K.G.B., and the Pope," The Nation, July 2, 1983,
pp. 1, 14-17

57 "Assassin Re-enacts His Steps Before '81 Shooting of Pope," New York Times
[UPI], October 19, 1983; and "Assailant of Pope is Questioned," New York Times [UPI],
November 7, 1983.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

turned to the front pages again in late December, when the Pope visited
Agca in prison. The 21 -minute meeting received front-page coverage in
both the Times and the Post, which reported that the Pope forgave Agca
while the latter expressed his repentance. 58

Downhill to the Trial. In December 1983 Judge Martella completed his
two-year investigation and delivered his report on the case to state pro-
secutor Antonio Albano, who had the responsibility to decide whether
there was sufficient evidence to bring Antonov and the other accused
Bulgarians and Turks to trial. Prosecutor Albano's Report was filed
with the court on May 8, 1 984. The 78-page document declared that the
evidence gathered by Judge Martella warranted bringing the defendants
to trial, thus returning the case to Martella for a final determination of
whether or not to proceed. The Albano Report was "leaked," and ap-
peared first on June 10, 1984, in an extensive front-page article in the
Sunday New York Times, authored by Claire Sterling herself. 59

The immediate consequence of the Albano Report was to return the
Bulgarian Connection to the headlines, now bolstered by official claims
of Bulgarian guilt. Although primarily a rehash of earlier charges, the
Report had two features worthy of mention. Most important, it dis-
cussed Agca's retractions of June 28, 1983, although it explained them
away as a "signal" to Agca's sponsors. The Report also gave promi-
nence to Agca's contention that the getaway plan called for the assassins
to be driven from the Square to the Bulgarian Embassy by Antonov,
where they were to be loaded onto a Transport Intemationaux Routiers
(TIR) truck, which would then be sealed by customs officials and driven
across several national frontiers to Bulgaria. (Such trucks, once sealed,
escape having their contents examined at each international border.) Al-
bano's Report said that such a truck was in fact sealed at the Bulgarian
Embassy on the very afternoon of the assassination attempt. 60

58. Henry Kamm, "Pope Meets in Jail With His Attacker," New York Times, De-
cember 28, 1983, and John Winn Miller. "Pope Visits Assailant As 'Brother,' "
Washington Post, December 28, 1983. None of the published accounts of the Pope's visit
included any reference to what Agca later claimed transpired, which was that the two men
discussed Agca's belief that he was Jesus Christ and the relation of the assassination at-
tempt to the so-called third secret of the Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima.

59. For an analysis of Sterling's distorted summary of the Albano Report, and the Re-
port itself, see Chapter 7, pp. 190-94

60. While the presence of the truck on May 13 was consistent with the Bulgarian Con-
nection hypothesis, the burden of evidence indicates that this was a coincidence unrelated
to the events at the Square. The use of a TIR truck would be another violation of "plausi-

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

On October 26, 1984, Judge Martella finally issued his own report,
which accompanied his decision that Antonov, Agca, and other Bulga-
rians and Turks should be brought to trial. In some respects this came as
an anticlimax. The Martella Report contained little that was new. None
of the problems in the case was resolved in the indictment, and no new
evidence was advanced which removed the burden of the case from rest-
ing entirely on Agca's credibility. The first news accounts of the indict-
ment were written without access to Martella's Report, so that they pro-
vided minimal information, but once again returned the prosecution's
case to the headlines. The initial focus was on Martella's claim that
Agca had been accompanied by a second gunman, Oral Celik, who fired
one shot at the Pope, slightly wounding him. Newsweek announced thai
the indictment gave "new credence to the 'Bulgarian Connection,' "
while the New York Times editorialized that "the existence of the plot
no longer seems conjectural." 61

In the months separating Martella's final Report from the beginning
of the trial in May 1985, several developments raised issues that would
come to the fore at the trial, and that presaged Agca's wild vacillations

ble deniabilily," which is characteristic of the entire Plot. The movement of TIR trucks is
known to the Italian government, and the Bulgarian Embassy is surely under intelligence
surveillance This would make their use extraordinarily risky. On the other hand, as the
police would know about TIR truck movements, this could have been the basis of a
coached response. During the course of the trial, Agca suddenly abandoned the TIR truck
sequence as the primary escape route, claiming instead that an auto getaway with Gray
Wolves was the first option, with the TIR to be held in reserve.

Other problems with the truck as the escape vehicle are as follows: ( 1 ) the truck was
loaded and sealed by Italian customs officials on a public street, not within the Bulgarian
Embassy compound; (2) the Italian customs officials responsible for inspecting the truck
have given sworn statements thai when it was sealed nobody was secreted within it; (3) if
Celik was somehow smuggled out of Italy to Bulgaria by this route, the Bulgarians unac-
countably allowed him to resume his travels through Europe (he has been seen in a
number of countries in recent years); (4) the trial evidence brought out the fact that the
Bulgarians had requested that the truck be loaded and inspected on May 1 2, but that a one-
day delay occurred by request of Italian customs; (S) a note found in Agca's possession on
May 13, 1981. with details of his plans, mentions a train ticket and trip to Naples, but
nothing about Bulgarians, cars, or trucks, and (6) if, as some have suggested, the Bulga-
rians intended (but failed) to kill Agca in Si. Peter's Square, why would they arrange for a
truck to convey him out of harm's way?

61. "The Pope Plot: A Second Gun,'' Newsweek. November 5, 1984, p 39; "The
Fingerprints on Agca's Gun," New York Times, editorial, October 30, 1984 Virtually
alone in the mass media, Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post pointed out that the only
plot convincingly argued in Martella's Report was a Turkish plot, and that any Bulgarian
Connection still rested on Agca's word only. "Pope Investigation Focuses on Would-be
Assassin's Accomplices," October 28, 1984.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

on the witness stand. One was the discovery that Agca had written a let-
ter to a military attache at the U.S. Embassy in Rome claiming that he
had accused the Bulgarians under instructions from the United States.
The letter, which was written in August 1983, expressed distress that
certain U.S. publications had called him a liar. "What is my guilt?" he
asked. "You told me: 'Speak up!' and I began to speak.""

Two weeks later Agca's credibility again suffered damage when, in a
taped television interview with a reporter from the Italian state-run net-
work RAI, he still maintained that he had been trained by Bulgarian
agents in Syria, but now denied that he had acted on anyone else's be-
half in his attempt on the Pope."

A final topic that made its appearance in the immediate pre-trial
period soon came to have a substantial impact on the trial itself. On
March 20, 1985, the business section of the New York Times carried an
article on the interwoven scandals of Francesco Pazienza, an Italian
former secret services employee and all-around "fixer" who had been
jailed in New York City in connection with the collapse of the Banco
Ambrosiano. 64 The article, the first to bring Pazienza to the notice of
Times readers, noted toward the end that an Italian Parliamentary Com-
mission had named Pazienza as the moving force behind "Super S" (a
secret clique within Italian intelligence); that he had been a liaison be-
tween Super S and the Mafia; that he had "attempted to serve as a link
between Italian officials and the incoming Reagan administration after
the election of 1980"; and that his counterpart in this diplomatic work
was none other than Michael Ledeen, a junior partner among the disin-

62. " 1983 Agca Letter Faulted U.S.," New York Times. January 19, 1985 The letter
also claimed that a former Soviet diplomat in Iran could provide testimony that Andropov
had conspired to kill both the Pope and Lech Walesa: and that, as "the U S foreign policy
is in a state of irresoluteness and bankruptcy , to overcome the Soviet threat it should
be said to the public that Andropov bears the responsibility for the assassination attempt
against the Pope and the Kremlin should be made to change its leader." Agca's letter was
published in the Italian newspaper Re pubblica on January 18, 198S. The Times failed to
note that Agca's claim to have had contact with a Soviet diplomat in Iran had been "re-
tracted" in January 1984 See Sari Gilbert, "Agca Letter to Envoy Published in Rome,"
Washington Post, January 19, 1985.

63. "Agca Recalls Prison Visit by Pope," New York Times, February 5, 1985, and
ABC Evening News, February 4. 1985. In NBC's Evening News on the same date, Mar-
vin Kalb reported only Agca's claims that he had been trained to destabilize Turkish de-
mocracy and was then sent on a mission to kill the Pope.

64 E. J. Dionne, Jr . "New Hope for Clues in Italian Scandals," New York Times.
March 25, 1985.

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

formationists seeking to link the Bulgarians and Soviets to the attempt
on the Pope. We will return to Pazienza at length in another context;"
here we note that readers of the Times's business section were given a
short (and extremely inadequate) preview of the role this major figure in
modem Italian corruption would soon come to play in the trial of the
Bulgarian Connection.

The Second Trial

The trial of Agca, Sergei Antonov, and their alleged co-conspirators,
lasted the better part of a year, running from May 27, 1985, to March
29, 1986. Led by veteran Judge Severino Santiapichi, with another
judge and six lay jurors, and state prosecutor Antonio Marini, the court
did not rely very heavily on the findings of Investigating Judge Mar-
tella. It chose instead to cover the charges with a virtually fresh inquiry,
focusing less intently on Bulgarian alibis and looking more closely at
Agca as a witness, examining his Gray Wolves links, and even delving
into possible abuses by the security services. Aside from the require-
ment of Italian law that all witnesses be heard, the thoroughness of the
trial coverage appears to have resulted from skepticism by the court
about the quality of the investigative phase of the case, and from the
case's political sensitivity, which demanded the appearance of com-
prehensiveness to legitimate any outcome.

In some respects the trial was over in the first days of Agca's tes-
timony, which demonstrated to the court and other observers that, while
intelligent and resourceful, Agca was subject to delusions of grandeur
and was highly unreliable as a witness. His reiterated claims to be Jesus
Christ and to be in possession of the secrets of Fatima took the court
aback. But equally devastating was his continuously changing tes-
timony and his failure to provide any evidence or basis for confirmation
of his central claims of Bulgarian involvement. It became evident that
Martella had distilled out one version of Agca's claims, which corre-
sponded closely to the one put up by Claire Sterling and Marvin Kalb in
the summer and fall of 1982, and that Martella had failed to obtain inde-
pendent evidence for these allegations or to examine seriously their in-
ternal inconsistencies.

The case against the Bulgarians disintegrated further as the parade of
Turkish Gray Wolves passed through the court. None of them admitted

65. See Chapter 4, pp. 91-99.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

to participation in the plot or knowledge of Bulgarian involvement, al-
though several claimed to have heard rumors of the latter. A witness
such as Abdullah Catli, who admitted sheltering Agcaand buying a gun
for him, had no apparent reason to deny Bulgarian participation in the
plot if it had been real. Yet the trial failed to uncover a single witness to
a Bulgarian contact with Agca. The $1.3 million allegedly paid by the
Bulgarians through Celenk to Agca and his fellow conspirators has
never been found. 6 * The rented automobile allegedly used by the Bul-
garians to move Agca around Rome has never been traced. And the
photo of Antonov in the Square has been rejected by the Court as not au-
thentic.

While the case against the Bulgarians fell apart in the Rome trial, the
Gray Wolves connection was confirmed and strengthened. The trial evi-
dence showed that Agca traveled within the Gray Wolves network all
through Western Europe, up to the time of his coming to Rome. Some
of his Gray Wolves comrades admitted to knowing what he was up to in
the spring of 1981, although they all denied participating in the Plot. 67
However, he got money from the network, its members supplied him
with the gun, and he had meetings and contacts with them even in the
last, Italian phase of his travels. It has not been proved that any of his
Gray Wolves comrades were with Agca in Rome on May 13, 198 1 , but
we strongly suspect that one or more of them were present. Whatever
the truth of the Gray Wolves' assassination-day presence and support,
the trial left Agca within a Gray Wolves, not a Bulgarian, network and
support system. The first conspiracy was clearly a Gray Wolves con-
spiracy.

The trial also strengthened the case for a "second conspiracy" and
the coaching hypothesis. In the investigative phase of the case, con-
ducted by Judge Martella, the lid had been kept tight on the role of the
secret services, the conditions of Agca's imprisonment, and the evi-
dence for inducements and pressures. That lid was partially removed
during the trial. Sometimes this was inadvertent, as in Abdullah Catli's

66. In the middle of the trial Celenk was released by Bulgaria and allowed to return to
Turkey, where he was arrested, interrogated, and held for various crimes. Celenk died
shortly thereafter, while incarcerated. It is an interesting fact that while the Bulgarians
were willing to free Celenk. the Turkish government would not permit him to go to Rome
to testify on the Bulgarian Connection despite urgent requests from the Italian court.

67 . On September 20, 1 985 , Yalcin Ozbey , when askedwhetherAgcahadi nvited him
to participate in the assassination attempt, refused to answer the question on the ground of
possible self-incrimination.

TWO: EVOLUTION OF THE CONNECTION

and Yalcin Ozbey's revelation that the West German police had tried to
bribe Celik and Ozbey to confirm Agca's claims. Sometimes it was
more direct, such as Giovanni Pandico's detailed description of the cir-
cumstances by which Agca's confession was coerced and guided by the
Mafia and secret services. 68 The great publicity given in Italy to
Pazienza's and SISMI's abuses of power forced a closer look at the sec-
ret services role and led to new claims supporting the coaching
hypothesis. None of this evidence was conclusive, but as we will see in
Chapter 5, it had cumulative power vastly greater than Agca's implausi-
ble claims.

Before looking in more detail at the evidence showing the Bulgarian
Connection to be a fake, however, we will examine the Turkish back-
ground of the "first conspiracy," and then look at the Italian context
within which the second conspiracy could be forged.

68. See Chapter 5, pp. 102-12

3. Hie First Conspiracy:
Agca and the Gray Wolves

While it is possible that the Pope's would-be assassin was manipu-
lated by some outside party, in our view Agca's motivation must
be sought in his Turkish roots. In this chapter we will show that Agca
was firmly based in Turkey's neofascist Right, and that he had long
been active in the terrorist group called the Gray Wolves. These roots
are quickly passed over by the "terrorism experts" who, claiming to see
no reason why a Turk would want to kill the Pope, cast their gaze to the
East to find the motivation for such a conspiracy. Yet an elementary ac-
quaintance with the history and ideology of the Gray Wolves quickly re-
veals a world view which adequately supports — if it does not "ration-
ally" explain — an attempt on the Pope's life. Just after the attempted as-
sassination, for example, Agca's younger brother Adnan told a reporter
from Newsweek that Agca wanted to kill the Pope "because of his con-
viction that the Christians have imperialist designs against the Muslim
world and are doing injustices to the Islamic countries. '" Such a view,
as we shall see, was in accord with the mainstream of Turkish rightwing
thought; and Agca's attempt to assassinate the Pope was but an extreme
instance of the campaign of terror used by the Turkish Right against its
enemies.

The Roots of Turkish Fascism

The chief vehicle for the rise of a neofascist Right in Turkey in the
1960s and 1970s was the Nationalist Action Party (NAP). The NAP was

I "The Man Wieh The Gun," Newsweek. May 25. 1981. p 36.

THREE: AOCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

formed in 1965, when Col. Alparslan Tiirkes and some other former
army officers took over the Republican Peasants' Nation Party (RPNP),
a largely moribund party of the traditional Right. Tiirkes was a charis-
matic former army officer who first came to national prominence in
1944 when he, along with some 30 others, was arrested for participation
in an anticommunist demonstration, a first indication that the govern-
ment of Turkey was about to drop its tacit alliance with Hitler and join
the allies. Tiirkes again achieved prominence when he and other ex-
treme rightwing military officers were exiled from Turkey following the
1960 military coup that eventually established Turkey's modem con-
stitutional structure. The return of Tiirkes, and the other officers who
had been exiled, in 1963, and Tiirkes's subsequent takeover of the Re-
publican Peasants' Nation Party, signaled a resurgence of the Turkish
Right; and the swift exit of the RPNP's traditional leadership left Tiirkes
and his associates in undisputed control of the small party. 1

The Pan-Turkism movement, to which Tiirkes and his colleagues
were the heirs, had its roots in the late nineteenth century. At first the
Pan-Turks had hoped to reunite all Turkic peoples in a single nation
stretching from western China to parts of Spain. 3 As the map in Illustra-
tion 3 . 1 shows, Turkish nationalists considered the Turkish people a na-
tion divided, separated by boundaries which ignored Turkic cultural and
linguistic unity. While the pre-World War I Ottoman Empire included
most of the Turkish people, many Turks were left out, and the Empire
also included other nationalities and ethnic groups which were not Tur-
kish. Thus Pan-Turkism developed in opposition to the Ottoman Em-
pire; it sought, as did many nationalist movements of that era in south-
eastern Europe, an international realignment which would regroup their
suppressed peoples into a single, homogeneous nation.

The breakup of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War,
however, hardly satisfied these aspirations. The new nation of Turkey
which emerged from the war and the Kemalist revolution was much re-
duced in scope and left the majority of the Turkic peoples outside of its
boundaries. Moreover, rather than causing the breakup of the Russian
Empire, the World War and the Russian Revolution reconfirmed

2. Jacob M. Landau, Radical Politics in Turkey (Leiden: Brill. 1974), pp. 193-217;and
Charles Patmore, "Tiirkes: The Right's Chosen Leader," New Statesman, April 6, 1979,
p. 478.

3 By "Turkic peoples" we followthe broad definition outlined by Charles W. Hostler
in his Turkism and the Soviets: The Turks of the World and Their Political Objectives
(New York: Praeger, 1957), pp. 4-83.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

HER IRKIN DSTDNOE TURK IRKII

BOZKURT

■ ATI riHHUJ KUD

11 1M1 10

Illustration 3.1: Cover of Bozkurt showing extent of spread of Tur-
kish people beyond the boundaries of Turkey.

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

the subjugation of the predominantly Turkish regions of Tsarist Russia,
cementing them to the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and
frustrating the hopes of Pan-Turks that these areas could be detached
from the Soviet Union and aligned with an enlarged Turkish nation. Fi-
nally, the relatively cordial relations achieved by the new Soviet and
Turkish revolutionary regimes in the 1920s resulted in the suppression
of Pan-Turkish organizations and ideas within Turkey, while the en-
thusiastic nation-building projects of the Kemalist state served to deflect
potential recruits to Pan-Turkism into the Turkish political mainstream.

There were several consequences of this realignment of national
boundaries and political forces. First, Pan-Turkism henceforth f ocused
even more sharply on the plight of the "Outer Turks," those peoples
who spoke one of the Turkic languages or who shared the Turkish cul-
ture and were outside Turkey's new national boundaries. They were
consistently numbered by Pan-Turkish writers at more than 50 percent
of all Turkish peoples, and an exceedingly high priority was placed on
Turkish reunification. Moreover, the most important or politically sen-
sitive areas in which they were found were in Cyprus (the birthplace of
Tiirkes) and in the Soviet Union. The Pan-Turkism movement referred
to these latter peoples as "Captive Turks," and for both ideological as
well as revanchist reasons the Pan-Turkism movement became strongly
anticommunist and anti-Soviet between the World Wars. In fact, Pan-
Turkism became increasingly aligned with the international fascist
movement, and became subtly transformed. Where it had once based its
definition of "Turkism" on a common language and culture shared by
different peoples throughout what its more misty-eyed advocates called
"Greater Turan," 4 under the influence of the fascist movements of the
1930s it increasingly emphasized the common racial ties of the Turkish
peoples and preached a doctrine of Turkish racial superiority akin to the
Nazis' doctrine of Aryan supremacy.

Thus it was not surprising that the German invasion of the Soviet
Union in 1941 was greeted with enthusiasm by Pan-Turkish organiza-
tions. Not only did it strike a blow at the ideological enemy; more im-

4. According to Jacob Landau , Pan-Turanism ' "has as ils chief objective rapprochement
and ultimately union among all people whose origins are purported to extend back to
Turan. an undef ined Shangri-La-like area in the steppes of Central Asia. . . Turanism is
consequently a far broader concept than Pan-Turkism, embracing such peoples as the
Hungarians, Finns, and Estonians." The term came to be adopted by many Pan-Turkists,
who used it to mean Turkish Homeland in a very broad sense Pan-Turkism in Turkey A
Study of Irredentism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books. 1981), p. I

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

portantly, it promised an opportunity to dissolve the Soviet Empire and
to unite with the Turkish motherland the Turkish peoples "held cap-
tive" within the Soviet Union. These hopes were also recognized by the
Nazis. As German armies advanced into the Soviet Union, Germany's
ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, cabled a secret report to the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs outlining the possibilities for enlisting the
"Pan-Turanism Movement" against the Soviet Union. "Germany,"
concluded von Papen, s

is called upon to pay special attention to the drawing of details for the formation
of a strong state organization in the southeast with the aim of keeping the
Soviets constantly apprehensive of this state. This task cannot be fulfilled in a
satisfactory manner by the Ukraine; its people are Slavs, and they could easily
come to believe at any time . . . that their common concord lies with the
U.S. S R. As far as the Turks are concerned, this possibility is wholly excluded.

As for the Turks, many responded eagerly to German overtures and
the possibilities created by the apparently impending defeat of the
Soviet Union. One area expert notes that "the Pan-Turkist irredentists
regarded as inevitable the defeat of the U.S.S.R. and considered possi-
ble the creation of a confederation of all the Turkish peoples of Soviet
Russia and Chinese Turkestan under the Turkish Republic's leader-
ship." In the autumn of 1942, anticipating the fall of Stalingrad, the
Turkish Republic concentrated troops at the Caucasian border, "ready
to exploit all the possibilities the German-Soviet war and a collapse of
the U.S.S.R. could furnish for the realization of Pan-Turkish ideals." 6

Beginning in late 1941, more than a hundred thousand Soviet Turks
were recruited out of prisoner-of-war camps by the Nazis and enrolled
into army units that fought alongside the Germans. In 1944 the Turke-
stan National Committee initiated the formation of the East Turkish
Waff en Verband, an SS unit, which consisted of four regiments of
Turks from the Soviet Union. But by this time the cause of Germany,
and thus of the Pan-Turks, was all but lost; and with the defeat of Ger-
many in 1945 most Turkish people were still outside Turkey proper.
Pan-Turkish organizations and publications continued to be dominated
by a strongly anticommunist, and especially anti-Soviet, ideology; and
while they were later to resume their alignment with international fas-

5. Cited in Hostler, op cil., p. 174

6. Ibid., pp. 176-77

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

cism, they also became aligned with the U.S. -led anti-Soviet camp in
the emerging Cold War. 1

This was the inheritance that Tiirkes and his colleagues brought to the
NAP in the mid-1960s. The party's structure served in turn as a vehicle
to disseminate a Pan-Turkish world view, and it soon emerged as a force
to be reckoned with in modem Turkish politics. The political program
of the NAP was set almost exclusively by Tiirkes himself, whose writ-
ings and speeches combined a vision of a science-based, state-planned
economy which would modernize Turkey with an archaic world view
that was rooted in the legends of the gray wolf who led the Turkic
peoples out of Asia to their homeland in Anatolia.

As with European fascism, Tiirkes's unwieldy ideological amalgam
sought to appeal to the "little man" allegedly crushed between
capitalist monopolies and a growing labor movement. It is important to
understand this, if only because western terrorism "experts" have ex-
pressed skepticism that Agca could both be a rightist and make anti-
capitalist statements, as he has done. A good example of the NAP's at-
titude toward capitalism can be found in this passage from one of its
journals: 8

Finance capital is by its nature and purpose not national. Banks, insurance com-
panies, and Financial trusts that are attached to it are the mortal enemies of the
national economy. . . . Finance capital is concerned with weakening and de-
stroying the national economy in all its aspects by robbing the banks, manipulat-
ing the stock exchange, and by various other swindles. . . . There is also a class
of compradors which participates in these activities of this anti-national capital,
reaping large profits and sharing in the crime. They are virtually traitors. Thus
the struggle between the national and the anti-national economy is one between
international capital and its accomplices against the nation.

Yet, continuing the parallel with National Socialism, none of this
"little man" propaganda prevented the NAP from enlisting the support
of wealthy businessmen. According to the prosecutor's indictment of
the NAP in the spring of 1981 , following the crackdown on the party in
the wake of the military coup the previous fall, records seized at party

7. Ibid., pp. 55, 179; and Jacob Landau, op. cil., n. 4, Chapters 3 and 4.
8 Yeniden Milli Miicadele, 54 (February 9, 197 1 ), cited in Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish
Experiment in Democracy: 1950-1975 (London: C. Hurst & Co , 1977), pp 263-64

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

headquarters showed that the NAP received funds from the Chairman of
the Executive Committee of the Secretariat of Turkish Businessmen, the
President of the Istanbul Chamber of Industrialists, the Chairman of the
Union of Chambers, the President of the Istanbul Chamber of Industry,
the President of the Executive Committee of the Istanbul Bank, and
many others.*

Turkes's brand of Pan-Turkism was also addressed to ultra-patriots
who believed that their nation was being humiliated by its weakness in
relation to the Soviet Union and the capitalist powers of the West, par-
ticularly the United States. This point is also overlooked by those prop-
agators of the Bulgarian Connection who profess to be mystified by
Agca's various pronouncements against "imperialism." Perhaps the
most important such instance was his handwritten message, allegedly
found among his possessions upon his arrest in Rome, declaring that his
assassination attempt was a protest against both the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan and the U.S. -supported counterinsurgency in El Salvador.
Yet Pan-Turkish propaganda is rich in such denunciations.

As is readily apparent, the Pan-Turkish social and political milieu
into which the young Mehmet Ali Agca was absorbed in the 1970s had
a well-developed, distinctive fascist ideology. While still in high
school, Agca became involved with the NAP's youth affiliate, the Gray
Wolves. The Wolves were so-named not only to enhance their ferocious
image, but also to emphasize the atavistic part of the NAP's heritage;
and it is said that the young recruits would howl when assembled to-
gether. In the late 1960s the NAP had established dozens of training
camps for young people throughout Turkey, and had built the move-
ment's strength largely on the basis of its youth organizations. 10 The
military coup of March 12, 1971 , gave the NAP its chance: as the mili-
tary government turned against the Left, the Gray Wolves became a
dominant force in many schools and the universities.

The NAP also prospered on the national political scene. A parliamen-
tary crisis in late 1974 left the small rightwing parties, including the
NAP, holding the balance of power in parliament. Demirel, the leader
of the conservative Justice Party, moved to form a "National Front"
government which would combine the forces on the right under his

9. Searchlight (Greal Britain), No. 75 (September 1981), p. 13.

10 A secret report, prepared by the Turkish Ministry of the Interior in 1970 but sup-
pressed by Prime Minister Demirel of the Justice Party, listed 26 such camps allegedly or-
ganized between August 1968 and July 1970. The report was made public during the
height of NAP activity in November 1978. Searchlight, No 47 (May 1979), pp 5-6

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

leadership. According to a leading historian of modem Turkey:"

Newspapers which supported the Front parties popularized the slogan "Demirel
in Parliament, Tiirkes in the street. ..." As a manifestation of this "division
of labor," by the beginning of 1975 rightwing violence in the street carried out
by Action Party "commandos" had become almost a daily occurrence. The aim
of this violence was to emphasize the so-called danger from the Left, and it gave
the Nationalist Action Party an opportunity to exert a political influence totally
out of proportion to its following in the country and its strength in the Assem-
bly.

Two of the NAP's three parliamentary representatives were given
cabinet posts in the National Front government: Tiirkes was made Depu-
ty Prime Minister, while a second NAP deputy was made Minister of
Customs and State Monopolies. 12 By 1977 the party was strong enough
to win seven percent of the vote in the general elections, giving them 16
Members of Parliament. Skillfully using its parliamentary faction and
its forces in the streets, the NAP gained control of the Ministry of Edu-
cation, which in turn assisted the Gray Wolves terrorists who beat and
murdered their opponents to gain hegemony in many schools." And the

I I. Feroz Ahmad, op. cil., n. 8, p. 347.

1 2 . A physical attack on Demirel occurred shortly after the formation of the Front. At
the trial, his assailant was shown to have been associated with the NAP. If Demirel had
been killed, Tiirkes would have assumed the post of Prime Minister. According to Feroz
Ahmad, ' 'There was much speculation as to what might have happened if Demirel had
been killed. Some though! that the government, led by Tiirkes (a man with fascist lean-
ings), might have declared a state of emergency . . . and established an openly f ascist re-
gime. . . This conspiracy theory was made more plausible because Tiirkes was said to
have a large following among junior officers in the armed forces, who were willing to sup-
port such a regime. During the summer of 1975, the author heard both stones constantly
while in Turkey" (ibid. , pp. 351 , 361 ). Ahmad also notes that "Tiirkes wanted to have
martial law proclaimed" (p. 362). and nearly succeeded in doing so in June 1975. Just be-
fore a visit by Tiirkes to the city of Diyarbekir, a stronghold of Shia and Kurds who were
strongly opposed to Tiirkes and the NAP's Sunni and Turkish chauvinism, NAP comman-
dos "came to Diyarbekir 'like an occupation force,' . . . and shouted slogans in the
streets: 'Flee, the Turks are coming. ' ' ' Ahmad reports that, in response to these provoca-
tions, there was a demonstration against Tiirkes "which became violent and almost led to
the proclamation of martial law" (p. 362).

13. Sterling, Henze, and NBC-TV have dwelt on the fact that Agca mysteriously
passed an entrance examination allowing him to enter Istanbul University They hint that
this is evidence that Agca was aided by some sinister (i.e. , Red) power They never ac-
knowledge the special position which the extreme Right had obtained in the educational
field, which provided an institutional basis for easing favored candidates through the edu-
cational system in the late 1970s

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

NAP used its control of the Customs Ministry to turn the endemic
smuggling from Turkey to Europe to its own profit. Finally, the NAP
deployed its small but politically crucial weight in the parliamentary
balance of power to prevent the government from cracking down on the
party's terrorist "commandos," the Gray Wolves.

At the time of the military coup of September 1980, there were some
1,700 Gray Wolves organizations in Turkey with approximately
200,000 registered members and about a million sympathizers. Im-
mediately following the coup, the NAP was outlawed and Tiirkes was
arrested.' 4 In its indictment of the NAP, which was handed down in
May 1981 , the Turkish military government charged 220 members of
the party and its affiliates with the responsibility for 694 murders. This
was only a fraction of the killing attributed to the Turkish Right. Statis-
tics for 1978, for example, recorded 3,319 fascist attacks, which re-
sulted in 831 killed and 3,121 wounded." Contrary to the impression
advanced by Claire Sterling in The Terror Network, the overwhelming
bulk of political and sectarian violence in the pre-martial law period was
initiated by the Gray Wolves, who were protected by their friends in the
military, police force, and government.

Agca As Terrorist: The Gray Wolves Connection

Although Agca's immersion in the world of the Gray Wolves has
been inconvenient for supporters of the Bulgarian Connection
hypothesis, the evidence connecting Agca to Turkey's neofascist Right
is overwhelming. What is more, these connections never tapered off and
may be traced right up to Agca's sojourn in Rome." Where Sterling,

14. Diana Johnstone has suggested that the assassination attempt on the Pope might
have been motivated in part by the NAP-Gray Wolves resentment at their betrayal by
NATO and the West. Tor whom they had served as a destabilizing force, but who had then
allowed them to be swept up along with the Left in the aftermath of the Turkish military
coup. "Assassins: Goal of Turkish Terror is Confusion," In These Times, June 3-16,
1981.

15. Searchlight (Great Britain), No 47 (May 1979), p. 6.

16. The trial provided solid proof of the Gray Wolves connection up to Agca's stay in
Rome. It failed to clarify the question of which, if any. Gray Wolves were with him on
May 13, 198 1 . The last authenticated contact was on May 9, when Omer Bagci delivered
a gun to Agca in Milan. We believe that one or more Gray Wolves accompanied Agca at
the assassination attempt, but hard evidence is lacking.

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

Henze, and Investigating Magistrate Martella saw Agca's relationship
with the Gray Wolves as either bogus or ephemeral , the evidence points
to a durable connection, providing organization, personnel, funding,
and an ideological basis for the assassination conspiracy.

Agca's association with the Gray Wolves began when he was in high
school. According to Rasit Kisacik, a Turkish journalist who has
studied Agca's early years, he was often seen with Gray Wolves leaders
while in high school; and when the police raided Agca's home in 1 979,
they found photographs showing the young Agca in the company of
leaders of the Gray Wolves. 17 Moreover, the people Agca came to know
among his hometown Gray Wolves activists aided him in many of his
later terrorist activities. While in theory the Gray Wolves were directed
by the NAP, in fact, according to Michael Dobbs of the Washington
Post, "the command structure seems to have been a loose one, allowing
plenty of room for semiautonomous factions and groups that did not
necessarily take their orders from the top."" 1 The loose network of Gray
Wolves from Agca's home base, the Malatya region of eastern Turkey,
seems to have functioned as one such semiautonomous group. Led by
Oral Celik — apparently involved in the murder of Turkey's most promi-
nent newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci, and in the operation that broke
Agca out of prison in 1 979, and identified by Agca as the second gun-
man in the attack on the Pope" — the Malatya gang supported itself by
smuggling and robbery. We find them present at each of the milestones
on Agca's path from high school to St. Peter's Square.

In 1978 Agca enrolled in Istanbul University. He apparently spent lit-
tle time in classes. Instead he hung out in right wing cafes like the Mar-
mora, which "advertised the politics of those who frequented it with a
large mural of a gray wolf on one of the walls." 20 According to Feroz
Ahmad, "students in the hostel where he lived remembered him as a
well-known 'militant' who was allegedly seen shooting two students in
the legs during an attack on a leftist hostel. His notoriety in terrorist cir-

17. Marvine Howe, "Turk's Hometown Puzzled by His Climb to Notoriety," New
York Times. May 23, 1981.

18. Michael Dobbs, "Child of Turkish Slums Finds Way in Crime," Washington Post,
October 14, 1984.

1 9 . This identification was supported by Ozbey during the trial, but was denied by other
Gray Wolves. Celik was a good friend of Agca, and Agca's motive in falsely implicating
Celik is not clear.

20. R. W. Apple. Jr., "Trail of Mehmet Ali Agca: 6 Years of Neofascist Ties," New
York Times, May 25, 1981.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

cles was such that leftists tried to kill him on a number of occasions. " Zl
On February 1, 1979, the Malatya gang assassinated Ipekci. Agca
was arrested a few months later; and, although there now seems to be
serious doubt whether Agca was indeed the gunman or just an accom-
plice, he quickly confessed to the crime. At his trial the following Oc-
tober Agca steadfastly denied any connection with the NAP or the Gray
Wolves, claiming instead to "represent a new form of terror on my
own." After several sessions of his trial, Agca threatened in court to
name "the truly responsible parties" when the trial next convened. This
clear signal that someone had better get him out was delivered within
days after the formation of a new, conservative government, dependent
on NAP votes for its parliamentary majority; and a few days later some
Gray Wolves led by Oral Celik smuggled Agca, disguised as a soldier,
through eight checkpoints and out of prison.

Agca's first act upon escaping from prison was to send a letter to Mil-
liyet, Ipekci 's newspaper, threatening to kill the Pope, who was about to
visit Turkey. Once again we stumble on an event which presents incon-
venient facts for Sterling and company, for on its face Agca's act sup-
ports the probability that he (and the Malatya gang) needed no KGB
hand to guide them toward a papal assassination. In his letter to Milliyet
Agca stated: 22

Fearing the creation of a new political and military power in the Middle East by
Turkey along with its brother Arab states, western imperialism has . . . dis-
patched to Turkey in the guise of religious leader the crusade commander John
Paul. Unless this untimely and meaningless visit is postponed, I shall certainly
shoot the Pope.

Was this letter written at the direction of Agca's KGB controller, as
Sterling and Henze maintain, as a devilishly clever cover for Agca's
KGB links? Was it written, as Agca himself later maintained, as a diver-
sion to throw his pursuers off the scent? While we cannot say with cer-
tainty, the fact that the contents of the letter accord perfectly with the
ideological views of the Gray Wolves and the NAP strongly suggests
that the letter simply speaks for itself; 23 and while Agca and the Malatya

21. Feroz Ahmad, "Agca: The Making of A Terrorist," Boston Globe, June 7, 1981.

22 Sinan Fisek, "Attacker Named As Escaped Assassin," London Times, May 14,
1981 . A slightly different translation may be found in Claire Sterling. The Time of the As-
sassins (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), p. 19

23 For evidence of NAP press hostility to the Pope's visit in 1979, see Chapter 6, p
156, n 90

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

gang failed to carry out their threat to kill the heavily guarded Pope dur-
ing his visit to Turkey, such an act was on their agenda.

At this point Agca's life as a fugitive began. Wanted by Turkish au-
thorities and Interpol, Agca nevertheless moved with apparent ease
through some dozen countries in the 1 8 months separating his prison es-
cape from his rendezvous with the Pope in May 1981 . Throughout this
time Agca was rarely outside the Gray Wolves network and was fre-
quently in contact with the Malatya gang. After murdering the informer
who had earlier tipped off the police to his whereabouts, Agca was
taken by the Gray Wolves to Iran to hide out. Some months later he re-
turned to Turkey and, aided by a false passport provided him by Gray
Wolves members, he was smuggled into Bulgaria and through that
country, arriving in Western Europe in the fall of 1980. Agca thus nar-
rowly escaped the military coup which forced many Gray Wolves un-
derground or into exile abroad. The Malatya gang soon followed Agca
to Western Europe, where they sought shelter among the Gray Wolves
network in the large Turkish immigrant communities of Switzerland and
West Germany.

In fleeing from Turkey Agca was not abandoning the Gray Wolves
network so much as seeking the shelter of its exterior branches. The
NAP and the Gray Wolves had recruited for many years among the mil-
lions of Turkish men who left their country to work in Switzerland,
West Germany, or other European countries for one or more years be-
fore returning home." When a 1976 Turkish court decision made it il-
legal for the Gray Wolves and the NAP to maintain foreign affiliates,
the Western European branches were reorganized into the Federation of
Turkish Idealist Associations or into Turkish "cultural" clubs, but they
secretly maintained their ties to the NAP. The Federation claimed
50,000 members in Europe at the time of the military coup in September
1980, with 129 chapters, including 87 in West Germany. The West Ger-
man police estimated that at least 26,000 Turkish workers in West Ger-
many were members of neofascist organizations. 25

24. For a vivid account of this great migration. s»e John Berger and Jean Mohr. A
Seventh Man (London: Penguin Books, 1975)

25 Another report estimated that there were 200 conservative Islamic centers in West
Germany; and the New York Times cited "recent documentation by West Germany's labor
federation [which) pointed out strong anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian cur-
rents in the Islamic centers' publications" (John Tagliabue. "Militant Views Among
Turks Trouble Bonn," May 21 . 1981) The de facto political alliances between the NAP
and Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey were probably operative in Western Europe as
well

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

This network of rightwing Turkish organizations sheltered Agca be-
tween the time he left Turkey and the day he shot the Pope. Simply to
list the confirmed links which have emerged at Agca's trial in Rome and
in collateral trials in other Gray Wolves centers in Western Europe rein-
forces this conclusion:

1 . Agca came to Western Europe with a passport provided by Gray
Wolves leader Abdullah Catli. Catli had obtained the passport with the
help of a customs official who was a member of the Gray Wolves.

2. Agca was sheltered by Catli and other Gray Wolves in Olten, Swit-
zerland, a major Gray Wolves smuggling center. 26 One of Agca's com-
panions in Olten, Mehmet Sener, was sentenced in Switzerland to a
five-year prison term for drug smuggling. Catli and Oral Celik were
wanted for questioning at Sener's trial.

3. Yalcin Ozbey, who was brought in to testify in Rome, was jailed in
Bochum, West Germany on drug smuggling charges. Before the murder
of Ipekci in 1 979, Ozbey and Agca had a joint bank account. Another
Gray Wolves friend of Agca, Rifat Yildirim, was caught with heroin in
Frankfurt.

4. MusaCelebi, one of the top leaders of the Gray Wolves in Western
Europe, had numerous contacts with Agca in 1980 and 1981, giving
him money and meeting with him in Zurich only six weeks before the
assassination attempt.

5. Agca's gun was purchased for him by Catli, and was delivered to
him in Milan only four days before the assassination attempt by the
Olten Gray Wolves leader Omer Bagci and two other Gray Wolves.

6. At the time of the Pope's visit to the Netherlands in May 1985,
another Gray Wolves member, Arslan Samet, was arrested at the Dutch
border while carrying a Browning revolver stolen at the same time as the
one used by Agca in St. Peter's Square.

7 . Numerous phone calls between Agca and Gray Wolves leaders in
West Germany and Switzerland were intercepted by the police in the
months before the assassination attempt.

In short, the available evidence shows that Agca was a Gray Wolves

26 For the Gray Wolves in Switzerland, see "Tiirkische Mafia Und Die Grauen Wolfe
in Der Schweiz," Informationstelle 7"«>*ei (Postfach 2151, 4001 Basel, 1985). This use-
ful volume includes analyses and excerpts from Turkish and Swiss newspapers on the
criminal activities of many of the Gray Wolves mentioned above. Much useful informa-
tion also emerged during the 1985 sessions of the trial, as Ozbey, Catli, and other Gray
Wolves were called by Judge Santiapichi and testified about Agca's connections to the
Gray Wolves in Switzerland.

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES 55

militant, and up to May 13, 1981, all his contacts led straight to the
Gray Wolves.

Agca As An "International Terrorist"

Sterling, Henze, and some members of the Italian judiciary 27 have por-
trayed Agca as a "pure" or "international" terrorist, who rises above
mere political loyalties and dedicates his life to random political vio-
lence. We may usefully pause to examine the "proofs" that Agca was
an apolitical international terrorist, for the fallacies they embody are not
only relevant to evaluating the Gray Wolves linkage, they also illumi-
nate the quality of the Sterling-Henze-Kalb evidence for the Bulgarian
Connection.

Agca' s Gray Wolves affiliation as ' 'cover. ' ' The Sterling-Henze school
has suggested that the Soviets and the Bulgarians recruited Agca early
and had him serve in the Gray Wolves as a "cover." Thus his threat to
kill the Pope in 1 979 was an attempt to provide a later basis for the claim
that he was a Turkish fascist, when in fact he was already under KGB
discipline.

One problem with this line of argument is the absence of the faintest
trace of supporting evidence. Another is that many of Agca's Gray
Wolves comrades would have had to be similarly manipulated. A third
problem is that the alleged Soviet motive to kill the Pope — the threat of
Poland's Solidarity — did not exist in earlier years, nor at the time when
Agca made the threat in 1979. A further problem is that the assassina-
tion threat can be explained on grounds of Gray Wolves-NAP ideology
without resort to hypothetical scenarios. Anything can be proved by this
form of pseudoscientific reasoning.

Agca was not a card-carrying member of the Gray Wolves. Sterling and
Henze claim that Agca never obtained an official Gray Wolves member-
ship card. It may be noted that this line of proof is diametrically opposed
to that made in the previous point. If Agca were a KGB recruit and they
wanted to tar him with the brush of Turkish fascism to cover up a later
terrorist act, the KGB would have made sure that Agca did the neces-
sary paperwork. Indeed, the absence of a membership card undermines

27 See Chapter 5, pp. 113-15.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the argument that Agca was controlled by the KGB while a Gray
Wolves activist. Apart from this contradiction, however, the record of
durable linkages and a longstanding political commitment must be per-
suasive to nonpseudoscientists, barring credible alternative evidence.

The motive behind Agca's confessions. Apart from their unwillingness
to give proper weight to Agca's Gray Wolves connections, Sterling and
company ignore three motivations for Agca's confessions implicating
the Bulgarians that render them worthless as evidence:

Loyalty: By claiming he was an "international terrorist," Agca took
the blame and kept the heat off his Gray Wolves comrades for many
months. He had done the same thing in Turkey by "confessing" to the
Ipekci murder in 1979. In the case of the Bulgarian Connection, Agca
should certainly have little objection to channeling ultimate guilt from
his best friends to the Communists, a longstanding Gray Wolves foe. 28

Self-Preservation: By accommodating his captors he made life much
easier for himself. We describe later the probable "deal" struck, and
the inducements and threats that made it worth his while to finger the
Evil Empire.

Publicity: Agca had long sought fame and recognition. According to
Turkish journalist Ismail Kovaci, ' 'Agca suffers both from jealousy and
delusions of self-grandeur. For him, terrorism represented his way of
leaving his mark on the world.'" 9 Michael Dobbs of the Washington
Post states: 30

Many who encountered Agca both in Turkey and in Italy, have spoken of his
"Carlos Complex" — his image of himself as a top-flight intematfbnal terrorist
with the whole world hanging breathlessly on.his every word. His desire for per-
sonal publicity seems unquenchable. At one point in the Italian investigation, he

28. One theory of Gray Wolves involvement, expounded by Orsan Oymen, is that the
Gray Wolves in Western Europe were not keen on the assassination attempt, which was a
preoccupation of Agca's (held over from the Pope's visit to Turkey in 1979). Agca per-
suaded his comrades to support him by promising that if caught he would blame the Soviet
Bloc for the Plot, not the Gray Wolves. Agca did implicate the Bulgarians and Soviets im-
mediately, although along with others, and eventually he came through with a full-scale
"confession." It is interesting to note that Celebi held a press conference in Bonn on May
21, 1 98 1 , in which he proclaimed that Agca had nothing to do with the Gray Wolves and
that the assassination plot had been organized and sponsored by the KGB. See Orsan
Oymen, "Behind the Scenes of the 'Agca Investigation,' " Milliyel, November 1984.

29. Michael Dobbs, "Child of Turkish Slums . . ." Washington Post, October 14,
1984.

30. Ibid

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

abruptly clammed up when the magistrates refused his demand that journalists
be present as he "confessed."

Having exhausted his ability to derive eminence from shooting the
Pope, Agca's deal to implicate the Bulgarians opened up new avenues
to attain star status and TV recognition. So did the trial, where he could
reveal his special role as the Son of God.

Agca says just what Claire Sterling says an international terrorist ought
to say. Since deciding to cooperate with the Italian authorities, Agca has
played the international terrorist card aggressively. Perhaps too aggres-
sively. Although until the 1985 trial he only claimed to have had contact
with low-level Bulgarian functionaries, he kept saying with great deci-
siveness that the KGB was involved. He could not know this from any
direct experience, but he learned the "model" into which his mentors
and captors wanted him to f it, and he kept helping them out. During the
trial, he suddenly trotted out a Sofia meeting with the Soviet Deputy
Ambassador, to the consternation of the prosecution and a chorus of de-
rision from the defense and the press. Agca's caricature of the Sterling
vision of the terrorist-for-hire (by the KGB) is so close to the original
that some of the Italian magistrates have been impressed by the excel-
lent fit! 31

In the real world, coached witnesses say what their coaches want
them to say. In a world of disinformation and internalized propaganda,
the courts and press marvel at the conformity of the "confession" to the
forecasts of the coaches!

The Smuggling Versus CIA Connection

Money was the lifeblood of the NAP and the Gray Wolves networks:
money for guns, money for bribes, and money to maintain the party's
organizational apparatus. As one former Gray Wolves member tes-
tified, 32 the Western European network of the Gray Wolves

3 1 See the comments of Magistrate Rosario Priore in Chapter 4 below.

32. Die Tageszeilung (a West Berlin daily), September 4, 1980 The witness, Ali Yur-
turslan, was later used as a source on the NBC program , ' 'The Man Who Shot the Pope —
A Study in Terrorism," but any information he had given NBC about Gray Wolves
smuggling was not used.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

sends large quantities of money back to Turkey. Not only money, but weapons
and equipment. Guns from France, West Germany, Belgium, and Bulgaria are
smuggled by sea into Turkey. . . . One of the Nationalist Action Party's great-
est sources of funds is drug smuggling. Heroin and hashish are smuggled out of
Turkey and into Europe, and the NAP even markets much of the drugs in
Europe itself. The profits go to buying guns in Turkey.

A British survey of the NAP's participation in drug smuggling states:"

The first indications of their involvement came in 1973 when Kudret Bayhan, a
NAP member of the Turkish senate, was detained in France with a consignment
of heroin. Also arrested with Bayhan were two other members of the NAP's ex-
ecutive committee. In 1976 another NAP senator with a car [trunk] loaded with
the drug was arrested on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. Three years
later Italian police at Trieste arrested nineteen Turkish right wingers transport-
ing a total of £2 million [about $5 million] worth of heroin. Some of them ad-
mitted to police investigators that the heroin was destined for the United States,
where it was to be traded for arms with underworld contacts.

While it is dangerous to place much confidence in any of Agca's decla-
rations, Turkish military prosecutors who reopened the Ipekci murder
case have accepted as plausible Agca's assertion that while in Istanbul
he supported himself through a black market smuggling operation or-
ganized by the Malatya gang.

Although much of the smuggling to and from Turkey was carried out
by sea, some of it also crossed the Bulgarian land bridge separating Tur-
key from Western Europe. Given the vast flow of Turks and others
traversing Bulgaria on their way to and from Western Europe in the
1970s, it was virtually impossible for Bulgaria to control its borders
against smuggling. Even with apparently serious efforts to control the
drug trade it is a notable fact that many of the biggest complainers (e.g. ,
the United States and Italy) have been unable to curb the traffic in their
own countries.

Some credible Italian and Turkish investigators have claimed that
Bulgaria tolerates and even participates in some facets of smuggling,
such as the arms trade, in order to earn hard currency. But this alleged
participation and acquiescence has never been proved to extend to
drugs, and the Bulgarian government's claims of serious efforts to con-

33. "The Heroin Trail and Gray Wolves Guns," Searchlight (Great Britain), No. 65
(November 1980), p. 7. See also Feroz Ahmad, op. cit., n. 21

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

trol that form of smuggling have been given credence by the U.S. Cus-
toms Service (see Appendix B).

It is dangerous to make the leap from the existence of smuggling to
state direction and control of smuggling, and even more dangerous to
then claim state responsibility for all the crimes of the smugglers.
Moreover, we now know that the Turkey-Bulgaria-Italy smuggling
route was run at least in part by officials from Italy's military intelli-
gence agency (SISMI); 34 and in reporting on March 23, 1983, that the
three top CIA officials in Rome were in "deep trouble," NBC News
suggested that one source of their problems was ' 'that they might have
been using a guns and drug smuggling route between Sofia, Bulgaria
and Milan, Italy to run their own agents into Eastern Europe. ..." In
short, it would appear that, as with all lucrative but illegal trades, the
smugglers' highway between Turkey and Western Europe was lined
with money and accommodated the intelligence agents of many nations
as well as the smugglers themselves.

Sterling, Henze, and Martella saw the root of the Bulgarian Connec-
tion in the drug and arms smuggling activities of what they call the
"Turkish Mafia." The main linkages are those between the Turkish
Mafia and those Bulgarian state officials who tolerated, protected, and/
or helped organize the smuggling. In Sterling's view, Agca was a rela-
tively low-level employee of this Mafia, and while in Bulgaria he was
on the payroll of Abuzer Ugurlu, the "Godfather" of the Turkish
Mafia. Ugurlu, in tum, worked with or for another Godfather, the Tur-
kish businessman Bekir Celenk. According to Sterling and company, it
was through Celenk and Ugurlu that the Bulgarians directed the Turkish
smuggling operations, and through them that the smugglers received
Bulgarian protection. And according to Agca (and then Martella), it was
Celenk who offered to pay Agca more than a million dollars to kill the
Pope.

The weaknesses of this linkage of Agca and the assassination attempt
to the Bulgarians via the smuggling connection are severe. First, once
again much of this story rests on the credibility of Agca, the sole source
of many crucial details. Furthermore, we know that Agca had read Ugur
Mumcu's Arms Smuggling and Terrorism, and there is reason to believe
that many of the details Agca gave his interrogators about such well-

34. "La P-2, les service italiens, le trafic drogues/armes: I'attentat contre le pape et ta
CIA," Le Monde du Renseignement, October-December 1983, pp. 43-44.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

known smugglers as Abuzer Ugurlu and Bekir Celenk were taken from
this book."

Second, while the smuggling trade between Turkey and Bulgaria has
been significant, it has involved the principals in a business relationship
with reciprocal benefits. The assumption that the Bulgarians control the
Turkish Mafia participating in that trade is unproven and implausible.' 6
So is the assumption that the NAP is a simple instrument of the Turkish
Mafia. Michael Dobbs presents evidence that Ugurlu was dependent on
the NAP for protection, rather than the other way around. Dobbs notes
that "to carry out this large-scale smuggling operation, Ugurlu . . .
needed agents in the Turkish customs ministry," and points out that "it
is now known that key customs posts were infiltrated by supporters of
the [NAP] . . . during the late 1970s. "" Particularly between 1975 and
1978, when they participated in the National Front government, the
NAP placed many of its supporters in key positions in the customs
ministry and at border crossing points. Needing funds to carry out party
activities, the NAP was in a position to deal profitably with the
smugglers and was increasingly able to take over the business itself. Ac-
cording to Orsan Oymen, "My opinion is that ... it was the Gray
Wolves who were in a position to ask favors from the Mafia. They were
the ones with the political influence at the time, because of their control
over the customs ministry."" Finally, Ugur Mumcu, the leading au-
thority on the Turkish-Bulgarian drug connection, does not accept the
notion that Ugurlu, the Turkish Mafia, and the Gray Wolves were in-
struments of Bulgarian political policy merely by virtue of their mutu-
ally profitable business linkages. 3 '

A third important weakness of the smuggling-based model is its ne-
glect of the anticommunism of the NAP and Gray Wolves and their
links to the United States and CIA. If these are given their proper
weight, not only is the idea that the Gray Wolves were up for hire by the
communist powers seen as foolish, but questions are also raised about
the possibility of a CIA root for the assassination attempt.

35. See Chapter 2, p. 27, n.36.

36. See Appendix B

37 "Child of Turkish Slums," Washington Post, October 14, 1984
38. Quoted by Michael Dobbs, ibid.

39 Ugur Mumcu, Papa, Mafya, Agca (Istanbul: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984), pp. 198-211.
Michael Dobbs points out that Mumcu believes that Ugurlu also worked for Turkey's in-
telligence agency, MIT. "Agca Makes His Way From Sofia to St. Peter's," Washington
Post, October 15, 1984

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

While the Bulgarians had links to the Turkish Mafia via the smug-
gling trade, the United States had established a far more powerful posi-
tion in the heart of Turkish society, notably in its army and intelligence
services. The huge Turkish loans of 1947-48 and the integration of Tur-
key into the U.S. -dominated NATO made the U.S. -Turkish relationship
one of patron and client by the early 1950s. 4 * Between 1950 and 1979
the United States provided a further $5.8 billion in military aid. 41 The
arms supply and training programs helped integrate the Turkish mili-
tary, police, and intelligence services into those of the United States.
Under the Military Assistance Program and the International Military
Education and Training Program, 19,193 Turks received U.S. training
between 1950 and 1979. U.S. trainees in client states have been instru-
mental in leading counterrevolutionary coups that have served their pa-
tron's interests ' 12 The patron is also often effectively an occupying
power, organizing the military and police, manipulating the political en-
vironment, and building its own bridges to serviceable (usually right-
wing) groups within the state.

The most likely avenue linking the CIA to the Turkish Right runs
through Turkey's "Counter-Guerrilla," a branch of the Turkish General
Staffs Department of Special Warfare, which was created sometime in
the 1960s. One study of Turkey's Counter-Guerrilla notes that it was
headquartered in the same Ankara building that housed the U.S. mili-
tary mission, and that the training of officers assigned to this unit "be-
gins in the U.S. and then continues inside Turkey under the direction of
CIA officers and military 'advisers.' " During the 1960s, according to
the same study, the CIA assisted the Turkish intelligence organization
MIT in drawing up plans for the mass arrest of opposition figures; and
the same work claims that this plan was put into operation following the
1971 coup. 43 Another study, by former Turkish military prosecutor and

40. By the end of Fiscal Year 1950 the Turks had received $150 million in economic
aid, plus over $200 million in military aid, along with over 1 ,200 U S military advisers
Joyce and Gabriel Kolko. The Limits of Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1 972), p. 4 1 3 .

4 1 . Michael T . Klare and Cynthia Amson . Supplying Repression: U S Support for Au-
thoritarian Regimes Abroad (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981), p. 81

42. See Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network (Boston: South End Press,
1982), pp. 121-32.

43. Jurgen Roth and Kamil Taylan, Die Turkei—Republik Unter Wolf en [Turkey: A Re-
public Ruled by Wolves], (Bomheim, West Germany: Lamur Verlag, 1981) Excerpts
from this study were translated in CounterSpy, Vol. VI, No. 2 (February-April 1982), pp.
23 and 25, and some of it was reprinted in "Tiirkische Mafia Und Die Grauen Wolfe in

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Supreme Court Justice Emin Deger, states that there was a close, work-
ing collaboration between the NAP armed commandos, or Bozkurts,
and the Counter-Guerrilla units. There was also a close tie between the
Counter-Guerrilla and the CIA. Deger charged further that the CIA, act-
ing through MIT and the Counter-Guerrilla, promoted rightwing ter-
rorist actions to destabilize the Turkish government and to prepare the
way for the military coup of 1 971. 44 It also seems quite clear that the
United States and the CIA were very anxious to oust the Demirel gov-
ernment in 1971, and assisted in the coup of that year. According to
former U.S. diplomat Robert Fresco, Demirel's government had simply
become incapable of containing the growing anti-U.S. radicalism in
Turkey." Turkish writer Ismail Cem argues, in his March 12 From the
Perspective of History, that the failure of the Demirel government to
deal with the "Hashish Question" — i.e., to curb hashish and heroin
production in eastern Turkey — as well as its failure to check radicalism,
prompted U.S. support for the coup. 44

Within this broad framework of overwhelming U.S. influence in Tur-
key and its apparent willingness to use it to manipulate Turkish politics,
there are indications that the United States, and particularly the CIA,
exercised influence in the rightwing political sectors that included the
Gray Wolves. The CIA-Gray Wolves Connection starts with the "Cap-
tive Turks," those peoples of Turkic origin who lived in the Soviet
Union and were the objects of much of the Pan-Turkish propaganda and
solicitude. These Captive Turks provided a target of opportunity for
U.S. intelligence in the post- World War II years similar to the Byelorus-
sians, Ukrainians, and others who joined forces with the Nazis against
the Soviet Union and later enlisted in the shadowy East European net-
works of the CIA. These latter operations have recently received a great
deal of publicity, particularly as a result of the work of John Loftus and

Der Schweiz". op. cit., n. 26.

44. Emin Deger. CIA. Counter-Guerrilla, and Turkey, citad in S. Benhabib, "Right-
Wing Groups Behind Political Violence in Turkey," MERIP Reports, No. 77 (May
1 979), p. 17. Deger bases pan of his argument on what he calls the ' ' Dickson Report, ' ' a
document which was apparently the product of U.S. military intelligence in Turkey and
which argues, according to Deger, "the common goals of imperialism with the Justice
Party" (p 1 38). The authenticity of this document has been disputed (see Claire Sterling,
The Terror Network (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 333), but no evi-
dence has ever been published by those who claim it is a forgery.

45. Robert M. Fresco, "A Problem of Visibility," The Nation, September 14, 1980.
46 Ismail Cem. Tarih Acisindan 12 Mart (Istanbul: CEM, 1977)

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

his book, The Belarus Secret. Loftus discovered that a secret division of
the U.S. State Department had recruited the leadership of a Byelorus-
sian military unit which had governed that region of the Soviet Union
while it was under Nazi occupation. This "Belarus Brigade" had par-
ticipated zealously in massacres of Jews, and had retreated westward
with the defeated German Army, even engaging U.S. military forces in
combat. Loftus found that the State Department's secret Office of Pol-
icy Coordination had recruited the Byelorussians, thinking that they
were gaining a working intelligence apparatus and the nucleus of a pos-
sible guerrilla operation within the Soviet Union. 47 While no evidence
has come to light of a similar U.S. operation directed toward the tattered
remnants of those units of Soviet Turks that had fought alongside the
Germans against the Soviet Union, there is no reason to suppose that the
U.S. motivations and practices toward pro-Nazi East Europeans that
have been exposed by Loftus were not also operative in the U.S. ap-
proach to Turks.

The best-known link between the CIA and the modern-day Pan-Tur-
kish movement is that provided by Ruzi Nazar. Nazar is a Turkoman
who was bom near Tashkent in the Soviet Union and deserted the Red
Army to join the Nazis during World War II. After the war Nazar was
recruited by the CIA, and according to Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu,
he "was successful in penetrating Turkish fascist circles in the days
when Agca worked as a hired gun" for the NAP.'" In the 1950s Nazar

47. John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). Some indica-
tion of the Pentagon's interest in the "Captive Turks" is given in the prefatory material in
Charles W. Hostler's Turkism and the Soviets. Hostler was a member of the U S . Military
Mission to Turkey from 1948 to 1950; and. while a member of the U.S. Air Force, con-
ducted this study on Turkish peoples within the U.S. S R. In his Introduction he notes that.
"My aim is to consider the political potentiality of the Turkish world. . . Inthecaseofa
Third World War — or intensification of the Cold War — or in case of internal troubles in-
volving disintegration of Soviet power, Turkish nationalism (especially the Pan-Turkish
variety of Turkish nationalism) will influence the policies of the Turkish Republic and the
action of the politically developed Turkish peoples of the Soviet Union." (Ibid., pp. 2-3.)
The Turkish military government's 945-page indictment of the NAP in May 1981 in-
cluded a letter from the party's West European leader, Enver Altayli, to Tiirkes. in which
Altayli listed his West German intelligence contacts. Among them was a Dr Mehmet
Kengerli, who was described as a former Nazi SS officer bom in Azerbaijan. Marvine
Howe, "Turks Say Suspect in Papal Attack is Tied to Rightist Web of Intrigue," New
York Times, May 18, 1981.

48. Mumcu was interviewed and some of his work summarized in the Atlanta Constitu-
tion, January 30, 1983. Mumcu claims to have received information about Nazar's CIA
links from a Turkish general who maintained close ties with Nazar.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

had worked as a part-time contributor tc the Voice of America, and it
was perhaps through this work that he met Paul Henze, who was then
working for the CIA at Radio Free Europe. Nazar apparently joined
Henze when the latter was sent by the CIA to the U.S. Embassy in Tur-
key in 1959. But by the time that Henze had become Chief of Station in
1974, Nazar's cover had been blown and his usefulness in Turkey had
come to an end. Nazar was then transferred to the U.S. Embassy in
Bonn where, according to Mumcu, his assignment was to penetrate
Gray Wolves organizations for the CIA, while maintaining his close ties
to Col. Tiirkes and the NAP. 49 Nazar was still active in these functions
in the 1980s. His continuing extreme rightwing orientation is evidenced
by the fact that he is a leading member of the Munich-based Anti-Bol-
shevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), and represented that organization at the
World Anticommunist League Convention in Dallas in September
1985. 50

In sum, the links of the CIA to the NAP and Gray Wolves were easily
as impressive as any NAP-Gray Wolves connections to the Bulgarians."
While the NAP was admittedly ambivalent toward the capitalist West, it
shared with the West an unmitigated hostility toward the Soviets that
makes a CIA connection to the assassination attempt more politically
credible than a Bulgarian Connection. Finally, there is a matter of re-
sults. If we look for the source of the Plot in the real beneficiaries, the
Plot turned out very well for the United States and badly for the Soviets.
Nonetheless, we do not believe that the CIA was behind the Plot. In our
view, the origin of the shooting lies in the Gray Wolves' ideology and
Agca's need to attain hero status by a political act. The benefits to the
West accrued from the "second conspiracy" — the induced confession
in Rome — and not by the shooting per se.

49. In his book Papa, Mafya. Agca, Mumcu reproduces a long letter from the West
German Gray Wolves leader Enver Altayli to Tiirkes, which indicates clearly that a
friendly and cooperative relationship existed between Altayli and Ruzi Nazar, and that
Altayli obtained inf ormation from Nazar (pp. 1 45-46 V Nazar also had a direct and cordial
relationship with Tiirkes (p. 144). Mumcu also reports that while still in Turkey in the
early 1970s, Nazar helped Tiirkes's daughter obtain a job in a U.S. airlines agency. See
his Agca Dosyasi (Istanbul: Tekin Yayinevi, 1 984), pp 28-29.

50. Martin A Lee and Kevin Coogan, "The Agca Con," Village Voice, December 24,
1985, p. 23.

51. The Soviet author lona Andronov has put up a CIA-based model that is somewhat
more credible than that of Claire Sterling. See Appendix O.

THREE: AGCA AND THE GRAY WOLVES

Final Note

Mehmet Ali Agca was a Turkish fascist, linked closely to the Gray
Wolves and working with them every step on the way to Rome. This
was amply reconfirmed at the 1985-86 trial, which highlighted the com-
plex web of associations linking Agca to other Gray Wolves activists.
At the same time, the trial produced not a shred of evidence, indepen-
dent of Agca's own testimony, that he had had any contact with a Bul-
garian in Sofia, Rome, or elsewhere. Thus, when Agca entered Bulgaria
through a border customs station controlled by the Gray Wolves, or
when he procured a passport issued in the name of NAP militant Faruk
Ozgun, obtained with the help of Abdullah Catli and a customs official
also in the Gray Wolves, there is no reason not to take these events at
face value: One of Turkey's most notorious terrorists had boarded the
"underground railroad" long used by the Gray Wolves to get their
drugs, guns, money, and militants back and forth between Turkey and
Western Europe.

4. Hie Rome-Washington
Connection

The creation and institutionalization of the Bulgarian Connection
must be situated in the political environment of the late 1970s and
early 1980s. In the late seventies, anti-ddtente forces within the United
States waged a furious battle against the second Strategic Arms Limita-
tion Treaty (SALT II) and any further pursuit of understandings and rap-
prochement between the great powers. Aided by the Iranian hostage
crisis, they were sufficiently powerful and well mobilized to be able to
kill SALT II and help usher in the New Cold War.

In Italy, also, the strengthening of the Communist Party in the mid-
1 970s and the threat of its participation in government had aroused great
fears in U.S. officials and Italian conservatives. A landmark in the ero-
sion of that threat was the murder of moderate Christian Democratic
leader Aldo Moro in 1978.' The recession of the late 1970s and early

I . Although Moro was murdered by the Red Brigades, the ultimate source of his death
is in dispute. As noted in the text below, Moro was number one on the hit list of an
aborted rightwing conspiracy of 1966, Plan Solo. Contacts with the Red Brigades were
made by a variety of political interests: Libya, George Habash's Popular Front for the Lib-
eration of Palestine, the CIA, and Israel (which sought a relationship with the Red
Brigades in the hopes that destabilization in Italy would make the United States more de-
pendent on Israel as its Mediterranean area ally). (See Luciano Violante, "Politica delta
sicurezza, relazioni intemazionali e terrorismo," in Gianfranco Pasquino, editor. La
ProvaDelle Armi (Istituto Carlo Cattaneo, Bologna: Societa Editrice II Mulino, 1984), p.
110, note 54.) Violante declares ironically that "the only services to which the Red
Brigades seem to have been impenetrable are the Italian ones" (p. 112), but this is not
firmly established. It is an interesting fact that the Italian establishment refused to ransom
Moro, although they paid lavishly to obtain the release of a lesser Christian Democratic
functionary, Ciro Cinllo. The Italian security services were remarkably ineffective in
locating the kidnapped Moro, missing important leads. Diana Johnstone notes that "Gen-
eral Musumeci interpreted the clear tip to Moro's whereabouts, 'Gradoli.' as the village of

FOUR. THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

1980s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the new wave of terrorism,
and the New Cold War environment in the United States strengthened
the Right and Center and weakened the Communist Party and Italian
popular movements. With the coming into power of Reagan, the ruling
Italian parties joined the New Cold War with enthusiasm and competed
energetically for honors as the local favorite.

The New Cold War and the "Antiterrorism" Offensive

In the United States the forces opposing detente have had an important
institutional representative in the Committee on the Present Danger
(CPD) and its follow-on Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM).
The CPD has had high-level representation in both political parties. 2
Among the intellectual weapons used by the CPD and its allies, "inter-
national terrorism" and the "Soviet Threat" rank supreme. By the mid-
1970s, the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" had weakened the force of
traditional anticommunist appeals in rallying support for U.S. interven-
tion abroad. Terrorist and Soviet threats are well suited to reinvigorate
that traditional appeal, and they have been used regularly by the CPD to
justify a more aggresssive stance toward the Soviet Union (and all of its
alleged proxies and sympathizers).

A major problem for the CPD faction has been credibility: What can
the media and public be induced to swallow in the way of evidence of

Gradoli in Viterbo province, and dispatched police there in vain. Moro was actually being
held right in Rome, in the via Gradoli, as was discovered too late. Musumeci led another
wild goose chase to a frozen mountain lake on a false tip that, when published, was inter-
preted by the Red Brigades as a signal from the authorities that Moro's death was ac-
cepted." ("Latest scandal leads to Reagan administration," InTheseTimes, December 5-
II, 1984.) Given the damaging effect of the death of Moro on the Communist Party and the
Left in general, a rightist role in channeling the Red Brigades actions is a plausible, even
if unproven, hypothesis. Further support to the hypothesis is given by other Red Brigades
actions that have been immensely convenient to the Italian Right, such as their latest
crime, the March 27, 1985 murder of economist Ezio Tarantelli, killed by the Red
Brigades allegedly because of his interest in weakening a protective wage-price
mechanism. But not only was Tarantelli an implausible target, his murder swung popular
support toward the very things the Red Brigades claimed to be opposing. Are they dumb
fanatics or serving a hidden agenda?

2. Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was a member of the
CPD. Brzezinski 's chief of propaganda was Paul Henze, a long-time CIA officer and one
of the leading exponents of the Bulgarian Connection. See Chapter 6.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the Soviet Threat? In the late 1970s the claim of Soviet military
superiority and U.S. "unilateral disarmament" made substantial head-
way, and a further tum to the right yielded a further enhancement of
media and public gullibility. A continuing difficulty, however, was
that — aside from remote Afghanistan — the failure of the Soviet Union
to send troops beyond its borders made the Soviet Threat too abstract for
some Americans and many Europeans. Something closer to home was
needed.

A substantial contribution to solving this dilemma came from the
State of Israel. Israel was under international attack in the late 1970s for
its policies of forcibly displacing Arabs and installing Jewish settlers on
the West Bank, its violation of the civil rights of non-Jews, and its re-
fusal to recognize any Palestinian right of self-determination. In 1979
even the Carter administration assailed Israel for its violations of Arab
rights, and 59 well-known U.S. Jews petitioned Prime Minister
Menachem Begin to reconsider his policy of expropriation and resettle-
ment.

The Israeli solution to this problem was to step up the propaganda
war. This had two features. One was to identify the Palestinians as "ter-
rorists." This served to dehumanize them and make it possible to deal
with them as "two-legged animals" (Begin), which is to say, on the
basis of force alone. The second theme of the invigorated propaganda
campaign was to claim that the PLO was a tool of the Soviet Union, and
that the Soviets were engaged in a worldwide campaign to destabilize
the democracies. This second theme was well designed to appeal to
U.S. conservatives and to fit in with the Reagan presidential campaign
and programs. Israel would be a front-line defender of democracy
against "Soviet-sponsored terrorism." The forcible Israeli settlement of
the West Bank and refusal to deal with the Palestinians would be ac-
cepted as part of the unified struggle against "international terrorism,"
rather than as a denial of basic human rights.

An important focal point of this refurbished, two-tiered propaganda
campaign was the first meeting of the Jonathan Institute, held under Is-
raeli auspices in Jerusalem from July 2-5, 1979. The Jonathan Institute
is a virtual arm of the Israeli government, 3 and representation at the July
1979 conference included a very large contingent from the Israeli state,

3. For a brief account of the Institute, see "The Jonathan Institute," Cover/Action In-
formation Bulletin, Number 22 (Fall 1984), p. 5. The Institute has met twice since its
original meeting, once in Washington and again in Israel

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

especially from the defense and intelligence establishments." The U.S.
contingent was virtually a Who's Who of the CPD and CDM, including
Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Senator Henry
Jackson, Ben Wattenberg, George Will, and Bayard Rustin. Also pre-
sent from the United States were Claire Sterling and Vice-President-to-
be George Bush. CIA and other U.S. intelligence representation was
substantial: Bush, former Director of the CIA; Ray Cline, former CIA
Deputy Director for Intelligence; and Major-General George Keegan,
Jr., former chief of Air Force intelligence. Present from Great Britain
were Brian Crozier and Robert Moss, both long-time assets of the CIA
and British intelligence.

The conference opened with an address by Israeli Prime Minister
Begin, who urged the conference members to get out and disseminate
the "Soviet terrorism" message. While- the conference was still in ses-
sion, Ian Black of the Jerusalem Post noted that ' The Conference or-
ganizers expect the event to initiate a major anti-terrorist offensive.'"
The participants were well situated to implement this offensive. Many
were important politicians, and a large contingent were media pundits
with direct access to a mass audience. Throughout the West the confer-
ence propaganda theme resounded, immediately and repetitively. In
France, Jacques Soustelle, former leader of the OAS secret army (par-
doned in 1968 for his treasonous activity during the Algerian war), a
conference participant and newspaper correspondent, summed it all up
in L'Aurore: The conference had "confirmed" that the Soviets "pull all
the strings" behind "international terrorism." "Toujours le
K.G.B.' " was the paper's caption. The same point was made to a re-
ceptive western press by Will, Wattenberg, Sterling, Crozier, and
Moss. The Jonathan Institute conference sponsors issued a compendium
of world press coverage some time later, noting in the introduction:

The Western press . . . responded to the challenge. As these pages show, the
Conference's message penetrated into many of the leading newspapers and jour-
nals in the United States, Western Europe, South America and elsewhere. That
the Conference had finally exposed what speaker Robert Moss, Editor of the
Economist Foreign Report, called the "Conspiracy of Silence" was no better
demonstrated than in the television documentary called The Russian Connec-

4. Four former chiefs of Israeli military intelligence participated in the conference. Our
account of the conference draws on the va luable M A . Thesis in International Relations by
Philip Paull, "International Terrorism: The Propaganda War," San Francisco State
University, June 1982.

5 Quoted in ibid., p 19

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

lion. Jointly produced by the American Public Broadcasting Service and the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it was shown nationally in the United
States and Canada on September 25, 1979.

On November 2, 1980, the last Sunday before the U.S. presidential
election that brought Reagan to power, the New York Times Magazine
carried an article by Robert Moss entitled "Terror: a Soviet Export."
(This is the same Moss who had previously been exposed as the author
of a CIA-funded attack on Allende, 10,000 copies of which were bought
by the Pinochet government.) This article, so strategically placed and
timed, symbolizes the power of the rightwing syndicate that met in July
1979, and the alliance between that syndicate and the mass media. It
also served to usher in the Reagan-Haig propaganda campaign and its
focus on "international terrorism."

Reagan, Haig, Weinberger, and company faced a problem similar to
that of Begin. They came into office determined to reestablish clear
U.S. military superiority over the Soviet Union. As spelled out in the
Pentagon's Five- Year Plan, the objective was to allow the United States
to operate without constraint over the entire globe — even to destabilize
and roll back the Soviet Empire. 6 An arms race would also be useful in
impoverishing the Soviet Union, as the poorer country would have to
spend to painful excess to keep only modestly behind the wealthier and
more technologically advanced one. While this strategy is clear, 7 the
cooperative western media have not allowed this reality to interfere with
their uncritical transmission of official U.S. claims of Soviet prowess,

6. A summary of this Five-Year Plan was provided by Richard Halloran, "Pentagon
Draws Up First Strategy For Fighting a Long Nuclear War," New YorkTimes, May 30,
1982.

7. Halloran says, "As a peacetime complement to military strategy, the guidance docu-
ment asserts that the United States and its allies should, in effect, declare economic and
technical war on the Soviet Union. It says that the United States should develop weapons
that 'are difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new
areas of major military competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment.' " Hallo-
ran continues: "At the other end of the scale, the plan says that 'we must revitalize and
enhance special-operations forces to project United States power where the use of conven-
tional forces would be premature, inappropriate or infeasible,' particularly in Eastern
Europe. Special operations is a euphemism for guerrillas, saboteurs, commandos and
similar unconventional forces. . . Further, 'to exploit political, economic and military
weaknesses within the Warsaw Pact and to disrupt enemy rear operations, special-opera-
tions forces will conduct operations in Eastern Europe and in the northern and southern
NATO regions,' the document says. Particular attention would be given to eroding sup-
port within the Soviet sphere of Eastern Europe." Ibid.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

bargaining chip strategies, and the genuine interest of the Reagan ad-
ministration in arms control and reducing nuclear arms to zero. 8

Nevertheless, the contradiction between the Reagan arms buildup and
the assertions of benign purposes is so immense that a larger infusion of
propaganda has been required. In fact, it has been necessary to stir up a
serious quantum of fear and irrationality to bridge the Reagan credibility
gap. The public had to be convinced that the Reagan policies were de-
signed to contend with something truly threatening and evil. The theme
of Soviet sponsorship of international terrorism has served this need ef-
fectively. The way in which the Reagan administration took advantage
of the Soviet downing of the Korean airliner, using it as a propaganda
instrument to dehumanize the enemy, is an object lesson in both the uses
of propaganda and the perceived importance of placing the Soviets in a
bad light.' To be able to pin the attempted assassination of the Pope on
the Soviet Union would be an even more important propaganda coup.
Accomplishing this useful end was a challenge to western intelligence,
media, and political institutions, but it was one which they met with re-
markable success.

The Italian Context: The Fascist Tradition and the Postwar
Rehabilitation of the Right

Western commentators have typically assumed that Italian authorities
investigated the Bulgarian Connection reluctantly, embarrassed by its
international implications, and that they pursued the case with the integ-
rity and fair play characteristic of the Free World. That the very exist-
ence of the Bulgarian Connection might possibly be explained by its

8. The New York Times, having published the excellent summary by Halloran cited in
the previous note, then proceeded to ignore its implications in its editorials over the next
several years.

9. For a discussion of the treatment of Korean Air Line flight 007 as a model prop-
aganda exercise, see Edward S. Herman, "Gatekeeper Versus Propaganda Models: A
Case Study," in Peter Golding, Graham Murdock, and Philip Schlesinger. eds , Com-
municating Politics: Essays in Memory of Philip Elliott (Leicester: University of Leicester
Press. 1986)

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Italian context — by conservative vested interests, political infighting,
and Cold War politics — is a point that never arises in the western media.
This reflects a potent propaganda system at work.

In reality, Italy has been periodically torn by major political scandals
ever since its defeat in the Second World War. An important feature of
postwar Italy was the continued and virtually unimpaired power of the
industrial, financial, military, and intelligence elite that had worked for
Mussolini. The rehabilitation of the Mussolini-era elite was part of a
worldwide phenomenon, by which U.S. and allied occupying armies
systematically supported the very forces which had collaborated with
fascism — whether in Korea or Thailand, Italy or Germany. 10 Thus, in
the Italian case, the prime aim of the U.S. occupying authorities was to
contain and defeat the leftwing forces that had achieved great strength as
antifascist partisans." U.S. protection of Klaus Barbie was in no way an
exception: 12 The U.S. occupying authorities in Italy went to great pains
to protect Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, a noted fascist collaborator
with the Nazis, 13 and most senior fascist politicians and military and se-
cret police figures were quickly returned to positions of power under al-
lied pressure.

This antidemocratic underpinning to the superimposed democratic
framework was strengthened by the Cold War. Fascist forces gained
greater confidence as they came to understand their serviceability to
Washington as protectors of the Free World. As Italy was seen in
Washington as an especially vulnerable area, given its large Communist
Party and powerful working class movement, the United States did not
hesitate to bolster the power of these Mussolini-era holdovers in the in-
terest of containing the Left.

10. See Noam Chomsky, "Containing the Anti-Fascist Resistance: From Death Camps
to Death Squads," in his Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the
Struggle for Peace (Boston: South End Press, 1985).

1 1 . See Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House. 1 968), pp. 60-
63; Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
pp. 147-51; Basil Davidson, Scenes From The Anti-Nazi War (New York: Monthly Re-
view Press, 1980); and Roberto Faenza and Marco Fini. Gli americani in Italia (Milan:
Feltrinelli. 1976)

12. See Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hinton and Neal Ascherson, The Fourth Reich: Klaus
Barbie and the Neo-Fascist Connection (London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1984).

1 3 . On the roles of James Angleton (OSS, later CIA) and Ellery Stone, head of the Al-
lied Control Commission, in the protection of Borghese, see Faenza and Fini, op. cit., n.
1 1 , p. 327. See also, Francoise Hervet, "Knights of Darkness: The Sovereign Military
Order of Malta," CoverlAclion Information Bulletin, Number 25 (Winter 1986), pp 30-
31

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

U.S. Penetration and Manipulation. With its military occupation of
Italy during and immediately after World War II, the United States was
not only the major force reshaping the Italian political economy, it es-
tablished a patron-client relationship that persists up to the present. This
relationship was based on U.S. economic and military power, an ag-
gressive use of that power, and the willingness of the Italian elite to
enter into a profitable though subordinate relationship with an external
protector.

As in 1922, when Mussolini seized control of the Italian state, the
threat of the Left in postwar Italy was the overriding concern of U . S . au-
thorities, and they were prepared to go far to keep the Left out of
power. 14 Enormous resources were poured into Italy to manipulate the
postwar elections. A Marshall Plan subsidy of some $227 million was
voted by Congress just prior to the Italian elections of April 18, 1948.
Much of this money was transmitted secretly to the Christian Democrat-
ic Party and to the split-off trade unions organized under U.S. sponsor-
ship. 15 In the mid-1970s the Pike Committee of the U.S. House of Rep-
resentatives estimated that $65 million had been invested in Italian elec-
tions in the period 1948-68. Ten million dollars was pumped into the
election of 1972." Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti estimated CIA
outlays were $20-30 million a year in the 1950s, dropping to a mere $10
million a year in the 1960s. These funds were also used to subsidize
newspapers, anticommunist labor unions, Catholic groups, and favored
political parties (mainly the Christian Democrats). 17

A second thrust of U.S. policy was the buildup of the Right. Accord-
ing to one study of the U.S. penetration of Italy: 1 "

14 US officials and leading businessmen had greeted enthusiastically Mussolini's
march on Rome and overthrow of a democratic order, regarding it as a defeat for Bol
shevism and reformism and a return to "stability " For the magnate and Secretary of the
Treasury Andrew Mellon, Mussolini was "a very upstanding chap . making a new na-
tion out of Italy." According to Judge Elbert Gary, Chairman of U S. Steel, "a master
hand has, indeed, strongly grasped the helm of the Italian state. " For details see David F
Schwartz, '"A Fine Young Revolution': The United States and the Fascist Revolution in
Italy, 1919-1925," Radical History Review, 33 (1985), pp 117-38

15. Faenza and Fini, op. cil , n. I 1, pp. 267-304, especially p 298

16. CIA: The Pike Report (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1977), p 193.

17. "TheCIAin Italy: An Interview with Victor Marchetti," in Philip Ageeand Louis
Wolf, eds . , Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (Secaucus, N.J : Lyle Stuart. 1 97 1 1 ,
pp. 168-69.

18. "The CIA Collects Fascists," Faenza and Fini, op. cit., n II, p. 262.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

The link between American strategic services and armed reactionary groups was
established in 1944 when James Angleton was invited to Rome by the OSS to
direct the "Special Operations" section and then the Strategic Services Unit.
His relations with the movements of the Right and with the clandestine forma-
tions always had a double objective: on the one hand, to receive anticommunist
information and, on the other, to utilize certain men and certain groups in spe-
cial operations. ... It is certain that many of the initiatives taken by the Italian
extreme Right in those years found aid, connivance and especially legitimation
from these services.

A National Security Council report of March 1968 stressed the U.S.
undertaking "to help out the clandestine anticommunist [i.e., extreme
Right and fascist] movement with funds and military assistance." It
contended that the Italian army affords "no serious guarantee against
Tito's [sic!] armies . . . [which] makes it necessary that all forces an-
ticommunist in sentiment should be taken into consideration.'" 9 Fol-
lowing the victory of the Right in the elections of April 1948, a new,
secret antisubversive police force was established under the Ministry of
Interior, with U.S. advisers. This was filled largely from the old fascist
secret police of Mussolini. At the same time, the fascist party Italian So-
cial Movement (MSI) began a massive expansion program, with the as-
sistance of U.S. intelligence officials. 20 MSI had significant backing
from business interests in both Italy and the United States, and probably
received financial support from the U.S. government. 11 The honorary
chairman of MSI was Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the long-time fas-
cist leader, who had been protected by the United States at the end of the
war. General Vito Miceli, another MSI leader, received an $800,000
U.S. subsidy through U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin in 1972." MSI
official Luigi Turchi was a guest of honor at the Nixon White House in
1972. "

19. "The Importance of Recognizing Anticommunist Revolutionary [sic] Forces."
NSC Document No. 740454, March 12, 1968, quoted in Stuart Christie, Stefano delle
Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Refract Publications, 1984), p. 10.

20. Christie, op. cit., n. 19, pp. 10-12.

21 . La Strage di Stato: Controinchiesta (Rome: Edizioni Samona e Savelli, 1970), pp.
115 ff.

22. Diana Johnstone, "The 'fright story' of Claire Sterling's tales of terrorism," In
These Times. May 20-26, 1981, p. 10; CIA: The Pike Report, op. cit.. n. 16, p. 195.

23. Christie, op. cit., n. 19, pp. 44-45.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

A third strand of U.S. containment policy was the buildup and
strengthening of Italy's military and intelligence services, manned by
the proper anticommunist cadres. In 1949, in the framework of Italy's
joining NATO, the Information Service of the Armed Forces (SIFAR)"
was organized under the guidance of U.S. intelligence. The close re-
lationship between Italy's joining NATO and the reorganization of the
Italian intelligence services is enlightening. According to the most re-
cent study of the Italian secret services, by Giuseppe De Lutiis: 25

Between the two events there is a strict temporal succession: March 30 the re-
constitution of the services being decided, and then the signing of the Atlantic
alliance on April 4. On August 1, Parliament ratified the adhesion of Italy to the
Pact, on August 24, NATO became operational and on September I, SIFAR
started. . . .

According to Gianni Flamini, SIFAR was essentially established by
the CIA, and served as a "docile referent" of all the American ser-
vices — the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, and the National Security Agency — as well as the West Ger-
man secret service, the Bundesnachrichtdienst (BND). 26 Flamini
states: 27

In substance, SIFAR was also a kind of pi»d-a-terre for American espionage
agencies, an instrument used to collect information useful to Washington, to
control the loyalty to NATO of the Italian armed forces, to interfere in political
life, and to orient the selection of military officers in favor of the interests of
American strategy and American big industry.

The dependent status of Italy's intelligence services is spelled out
more precisely by Massimo Caprara: 28

24. This name was later changed, becoming SID. SID in turn was eventually divided
into SISDE, concerned with internal security affairs, and SISMI, the service with respon-
sibility for external intelligence matters.

25. Giuseppe De Lutiis, Sioria dei servi2i segreti in Italia (Rome: Editori Reuniti,
1985), pp. 46-47.

26. Gianni Flamini, // panito del golpe: Le stralegie delta tensione e del terrore dal
prima cenlrosinislra organico al sequestro Moro, I (Ferrara: halo Bovolenta, 1981 ), pp.
5-7.

27. Ibid., p. 7.

28. Massimo Caprara, "I setti diavoli custodi," // Mondo, June 20, 1974, quoted in De
Lutiis. op. cil., n. 25, p. 46.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

On the basis of the NATO accords, SID [the later name of SIFAR] was obliged
to pass information and to receive instructions from a central office attached to
the CIA. . . . The code name of the receiving office in the USA was Brenno In
strictly military matters, the relations with the USA were conducted with the
ONI [Office of Naval Investigations], with OSI [Office of Special Investiga-
tions (Air Force)] , and with the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] , which de-
pended, in turn, on the Defense Department and which also collected informa-
tion in technical and scientific fields. . . .

De Lutiis points out that the obligations of the secret services go
beyond this, as they rely on U.S. facilities in the fields of espionage and
telecommunications, including NSA interception and decoding of sig-
nals, and the secret services are parties to a 1 947 western intelligence
agency information pooling system in which their unequal status was
fixed by prior agreement."

SIFAR was the instrument of a "permanent project of anticommunist
offensive called in code Demagnetize, a version analogous to a similar
project under way in France.'" 0 The main features of this project, ac-
cording to Flamini, 3 ' were

political, psychological and paramilitary operations aiming to reduce the pre-
sence of the Italian communist party. . . . The ultimate objective of the plan is
to reduce the strength of the communist parties, their material resources, their
influence in the French and Italian governments and particularly in the trade un-
ions, in order to reduce as much as possible the danger that communism poses in
France and Italy, in accord with the interests of the United States in these two
countries.

The extreme rightwing orientation of SIFAR is indicated by the fact
that in 1952 its project Demagnetize was directed by Giovanni De
Lorenzo (head of SIFAR) and, from U.S. intelligence, Vemon Walters.
Walters has been a central figure in U.S. destabilization efforts abroad.
He was active in Brazil in the coup of 1964, and close to Pinochet and
the head of the secret police, Manuel Contreras, in Chile. De Lorenzo, a
man of the extreme Right and a friend of Borghese, 32 was a principal
planner and organizer of two attempted fascist coups in postwar Italy.
De Lorenzo also became head of the Italian carabinieri, the largest

29 Ibid. p. 47.

30 Roberto Faenza, // malaffare (Milan: Mondadon, 1978), p. 3 1 3, quoted in Flamini,

op. cil., n. 26, p. 10.

31. Ibid.

32. De Lutiis, op. cil., n. 25, p. 105.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

paramilitary police force in Europe, which was quickly integrated into
the defense plans of NATO." Both SIFAR and the carabinieri were
loaded up with individuals of the Right.

A fourth thread of U.S. policy in Italy was preparing organizations
and contingency plans specifically oriented to contesting a victory of the
Left, even if brought about by strictly democratic processes. Marchetti
noted in 1974 that "the CIA has emergency plans," and he thought that
the possibility of a coup d'etat along the lines of that of the Greek Colo-
nels in 1967 was a likely CIA scenario. The military and intelligence
structures put in place in Italy, as in Greece and Chile, were well suited
to such contingency plans. NATO, for example, strongly encouraged
the development of secret military and paramilitary organizations under
the rubric of Civil Emergency Planning, with forces and plans that
would go into action in defense of the Free World in the event of a
Soviet (or Yugoslav!) invasion or internal political upheavals. The
workings of this protective model were on full display in Greece in
1967, when the fascist Colonels' takeover put into effect the NATO
contingency "Plan Prometheus" in toppling the democratically elected
government. The forces implementing this plan were elite members of
the U.S. -trained and NATO-controlled Mountain Assault Brigade. , •' It
should be noted that this coup, using NATO forces, was not in response
to a Soviet invasion or any internal Communist threat — it merely facili-
tated the preservation in power of a government that would be strongly
responsive to U.S. and NATO orders, and removed the threat of one
coming to power that would be somewhat more independent.

The buildup of NATO military and paramilitary forces to combat the
threat from the Left was actually part of a larger U .S. strategic plan. The
1960s was the age of maturation of the U.S. "insurance policy" strate-
gy of building up security forces in client states, training them in coun-
terinsurgency methods, indoctrinating them on the Communist threat,
and then sending them home to protect "freedom." 35 Although this was

33 Ibid., pp. 25-28, Terracini el al., Le insliluzioni mililari e V ordinamento cos-
riiuzionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974), p. 54. SIFAR had an economic research section
(REI) that worked closely with Italian industry, serving as an informational link and coor-
dinator of activities between intelligence agencies and business. The head of the research
unit stressed the role of intelligence in facilitating economic policy — for example, its ser-
vice in combating Communist attempts to exploit austerity measures. See Flamini, op.
cit , n. 26, p. 17.

34. Christie, op. cit.. n. 19, p. 39.

35. See especially, Miles Wolpin, Military Aid and Counterrevolution in the Third
World (Boston: Lexington, 1972). The concept of an "insurance policy" strategy is based
on a speech by U.S General Robert W Porter, who described our investment in the Latin

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

all done under Che facade of "protecting democracy," 36 this pretense
was one of the great hypocrisies of modem times. In the wake of this
strategy came a series of counterrevolutions, led by U.S. -trained mili-
tary and security service personnel, that left Latin America covered with
neofascist National Security States, and institutionalized torture and
death squads. 37 Fascists are reliable anticommunists, and where an-
ticommunism is the paramount value, there will be little hesitancy in
mobilizing them to do the dirty work and to rule or share the rule of
threatened clients.

In Italy, the formation of NATO led to the development of auxiliary
forces, recruited from the fascist underground, who could act under of-
ficial cover as part of a military backup force. Under this program, spe-
cial training was given by the Italian armed forces in western Sardinia to
members of Stefano delle Chiaie's extreme rightwing organization,
which authored many of the most important terrorist outrages of later
years in Italy." Some 200 cadres of the extreme Right were also sent by
the Italian intelligence agency SID for training in the Colonels' Greece
in 1968. 3 * Thus NATO contributed to the strengthening of both official
and unofficial forces looking toward an authoritarian solution to politi-
cal problems and willing to collaborate with rightwing terrorism in
achieving that end.

The ' 'Party of the Coup. ' ' This phrase has been used in Italy to refer to a
loose alliance of extreme rightwing activists, intellectuals, indus-
trialists, and military and secret services personnel who were deter-
mined to counter the rise of the Left by seeking a "law and order" or
fascist government. They worked toward a coup by enlisting and or-
ganizing sympathetic persons in power for an actual coup attempt, and
by encouraging and using strategies of terrorism and disruption to pro-
military establishment as a form of insurance policy against investment losses. See Jan
Black, United Stales Penetration of Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania,
1977). p. 228

36. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified before Congress on April9, 1962,
that one of the great merits of U.S. military training programs was that "Each of these
men will receive an exposure to democracy at work." Cited in Black, op. nr.. n 35. p.
160.

37 See Edward S Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Prop-
aganda (Boston: South End Press, 1982), Chapter 3.

38. Christie, op. cit.. n. 19, p. 141

39. De Lutiis, op. cit.. n. 25, p. 191.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

vide the conditions justifying the termination of democratic govern-
ment.

The "party" came into existence in response to the political and or-
ganizational advance of the Left in the early 1960s, the subsequent for-
mation of a Center-Left government in 1964, and the increasing possi-
bility that the Communist Party itself might share in the exercise of na-
tional political power. A landmark event in the coalescence of this
loosely knit group was a 1965 meeting organized in Rome by the Pollio
Institute, an independent foundation linked to the military and the Chris-
tian Democratic government. The meeting was chaired by an active-
duty general and the president of the Milan Court of Appeals, and was
attended by leaders of the security forces, rightist politicians, and a
number of individuals who later achieved notoriety as fascist terrorists
(Stefano delle Chiaie, Mario Merlino). The dominant themes of the
meeting were the Communist threat and the need for a global mobiliza-
tion to counter this threat. The use of subversive and violent methods
was openly discussed. It was proposed that organizing work be done
among the most conservative constituencies: state functionaries, profes-
sionals, teachers, small industrialists, etc.; that there be "pressure ac-
tions' ' (azioni di pressione) undertaken by armed groups; and that clan-
destine destabilizing actions be carried out. All this was to be coordi-
nated by a top level council, 40 which continued to function for some
years. Many of the participants in the meeting were eventually recruited
into the secret services and played a role in later coup attempts and ter-
rorist acts. 41

There were numerous coup plans and at least one genuine but aborted
attempt at a coup by the forces of the Right between 1964 and 1974. In
1964 a plan was drawn up by General De Lorenzo (head of the
carabinieri and SIFAR) and some 20 other senior military officials for a
coup that would have involved the assassination of Premier Aldo Moro
and his replacement by a rightwing Christian Democrat. This coup plan,
code named "Plan Solo," was called off at the last moment as a result
of a political compromise between the socialists and rightwing Christian
Democrats. 42 A rightwing coup was actually begun in 1970, using the

40 Franco Ferraresi, "La Destra Eversiva," in Ferraresi, ed , La desira radicate
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984), pp. 57-61

4 1 . The well-known Italian fascist Guido Giannettini attended the 1965 conference and
subsequently worked for both the Italian and German secret services. De Lutiis, op cit ,
n. 25, pp. 95-107; Christie, op. cit.. n. 19, pp. 139-40.

42. Christie, op. cit.. n. 19. p. 24. Plan Solo was so named because its instrumentality

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

code name ' Tora, Tora' ' (although in later years it was usually referred
to as "the Borghese coup"). Fascist leader Junio Valerio Borghese and
Stefano delle Chiaie led an occupation of the buildings of the Ministry
of Interior in Rome on December 7. 1970. For reasons still not clear, the
coup was called off, and for three months the matter was hushed up by
the Italian secret services." After the story broke, Borghese and delle
Chiaie, forewarned as usual, were able to escape to Spain, still under
friendly fascist rule."

De Lorenzo was in the forefront of another effort to build for a coup
d'etat, helping to organize a putchist group known as the "Rose of the
Winds." His carabinieri were purged of any dissidents from hardline
anticommunism, and a further effort was made to make all of the secret
services into politicized, ideologically rightwing agencies. Within the
armed forces a secret organization of anticommunist officers was estab-
lished. At the top of this Rose of the Winds conspiracy was a group of
87 officers representing every military and secret services branch.
SIFAR was given the job of collecting dossiers on Italian "subver-
sives" who were to be neutralized in a coup. This conspiracy was un-
covered in 1974. According to one of the plotters, Roberto Cavallero,
"when trouble erupts in the country — rioting, trade union pressure, vio-
lence, etc. — the Organization goes into action to conjure up the option
of a return to order. When these troubles do not erupt (of themselves),
they are contrived by the far Right . . . directed and financed by mem-
bers of the Organization.'""

It should be reiterated that De Lorenzo, a major force in organizing
the Rose of the Winds, and a man of the extreme Right, came into
prominence and authority as head of SIFAR, a CIA-dominated organi-
zation. A later head of SID, the successor organization to SIFAR, Gen-
eral Vito Miceli, was also of the extreme Right, and was a conduit for
U.S. funds in Italy. Both De Lorenzo and Miceli, upon leaving the
"public service," became leaders of MSI, the Italian fascist party. It is
also worthy of note that Miceli, when acknowledging the existence of

was solely the carabinieri, a military force controlled by De Lorenzo and. as noted, inte-
grated into NATO De Lutiis, op cil . n. 25, p 85.

43 At the time, it was rumored in Italy that the coup had been called off because the
promised U S support failed to materialize. Among the documents seized after Borgh-
ese s flight was a draft plan to send a special ambassador to the United States to ask for a
loan and offer to send Italian troops to Vietnam Ferraresi. op. cil., n. 40, p 102

44. De Lutiis, op. cil., n. 25. pp 103-5.

45 Quoted in Christie, op. cil , n. 19, p. 36.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

the secret Rose of the Winds conspiracy, stated to the investigating
magistrates that the organization was established "at the request of the
Americans and NATO . . . ""* Cavallero also claimed that the Rose of
the Winds secret parallel group was under the direction of "Italian and
American secret service members, as well as some agents of multina-
tional corporations." 47

Propaganda Due (P-2). In a scandal that broke in 198 1 , shortly after the
attempted assassination of the Pope, Italians became aware of the im-
mense power of P-2. In a sense, P-2 merely extended the Rose of the
Winds conspiratorial structure beyond the military and secret services to
the entire administrative apparatus of the Italian state. As a later official
investigation put it, P-2 had established a "state within a state."

The immediate effect of the scandal was the resignation of several
cabinet ministers and high civil servants whose membership in P-2 had
been revealed. This was quickly followed by the fall of the Forlani gov-
ernment in June 1981. It was not until July 12, 1984, however, that the
Italian Parliament completed its extensive investigation of P-2 and is-
sued its 1 70-page final report. The Report of the Parliamentary Com-
mission of Inquiry on the Masonic Lodge P-2," which went completely
unnoticed in the U.S. mass media, describes one of the most com-
prehensive attempts to undermine and control a western democracy
since World War II. It reveals a far-reaching rightwing conspiracy
which permeated the higher echelons of Italian political life, including
all those institutions which took responsibility for creating and then in-
vestigating the Bulgarian Connection.

Licio Gelli, the head of P-2, was a lifelong supporter of fascist
causes. As a youth he fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and
he served Mussolini loyally during World War II. Soon after the war,
following disclosures that he had been involved in the torture and mur-
der of Italian partisans, Gelli fled to Argentina. There he became inti-
mately involved with fascists, including Jose Lopez Rega, the founder
of the AAA Anticommunist League, whose members gained notoriety
as torturers and executioners in the "secret war" of the early 1970s.
Gelli remained in Argentina for 20 years before returning to Italy as an
Argentinian consul.

46. Ibid

47. De Luliis, op. cit., n. 25, p 111.

48. All quotations in this section not otherwise attributed are to this Report.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Upon his return to Italy, Gelli was initiated into Freemasonry. In
Italy, as in many other countries, freemasonry long served as a secret,
anti-clerical organization, generally drawing its members from the mid-
dle class and the technocratic strata. Gelli 's sponsor recommended him
as "someone in a position to make a notable contribution to the order in
terms of recruitment of qualified [i.e., important] persons." In 1971
Gelli was made organizing secretary of Loggia Propaganda, which
henceforth was known as "the Gelli-P-2 Group." In his new role Gelli
was permitted to initiate new members, a privilege previously permitted
only to Venerable Grand Masters. He immediately began to recruit "a
great number" of generals and colonels in the Italian military. At the
same time, going against the longstanding tradition of Italian masonry
that excluded political discussions, Gelli began to politicize P-2 lodge
meetings. According to an agenda in the possession of the Parliamen-
tary Commission, for example, one meeting considered "the political
and economic situation in Italy, the threat of the Communist Party now
in accord with clericalism aiming at the conquest of power," and "our
position in the event of a coming to power of the clerico-communists . ' '

During the initial phase of Gelli's conspiracy, he recruited with an
eye to the possibility that P-2 would have to organize political action
against a seizure of power by the Left. For this reason he placed particu-
lar emphasis, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, on recruiting mili-
tary and intelligence personnel. By 1974 Gelli had recruited a total of
195 military officers, of whom 92 held the rank of general or colonel.
The Report of the Parliamentary Commission concluded that Gelli's re-
cruitment of Italian military personnel constituted "a map of military
power at the highest level with persons who often assumed a role in eve-
nts of particular significance in the recent history of our country, as well
as in relation with events of a subversive character." The Report also
noted that Gelli was able to manipulate the P-2 military membership to
advance "the political objectives of Gelli and P-2, objectives hardly
compatible with services on behalf of democratic institutions since they
responded to directives from centers of power extraneous, if not hostile,
to such institutions." Gelli also "played a direct role in promotions in
the military service," according to the Report, which claimed that "The
penetration of P-2 into circles at the top of the military hierarchy ended
in creating a situation in which entrance into the [P-2] lodge constituted
a sort of obligatory passage in order to rise to higher levels of responsi-
bility." High officers also pressured their subordinates to join P-2 if

FOUR: THE ROME- WASHINGTON CONNECTION

they wanted to make higher rank or achieve their preferred posts.

Gelli was equally successful in recruiting among the intelligence ser-
vices. The Parliamentary Report points out that the heads of all three
secret services in Italy — General Grassini of SISDE, General Santovito
of SISMI, and Prefect Peolosi of CESIS — were members of P-2. The
Report also states flatly that Gelli himself was a member of the Italian
secret services. Gelli 's influence in the highest circles of Italian intelli-
gence was similar to the role he played with the Italian military: These
intelligence organizations and their leaders, often acting at the behest of
Licio Gelli, were "involved with subversive groups and organizations,
inciting and aiding them in their criminal projects" in support of Gelli's
political objectives.

The major shift to the left in Italy, which was marked by the elections
of 1975 and 1976, suggested the real possibility of an eventual acces-
sion to power of the Communist Party. This produced a fundamental
shift in Gelli's P-2 strategy. According to the Parliamentary Commis-
sion, where Gelli had earlier fostered destabilization, he now aimed at
political stabilization." 9 This would be achieved through penetrating the
highest reaches of not only the military and intelligence agencies, but
also the top echelons of all levels of Italian life Gelli's new objective
was to obtain a position of outright control — behind the scenes — so that
even if the Communist Party came to power it would make no real dif-
ference in the basic structures of Italian political life.

With his new strategy, Gelli successfully "penetrated into the most
important sectors of the institutions of the State. " By 1979, P-2 mem-
bership had grown to at least 953, and the Parliamentary Report notes
that Gelli's "new members came from the most sensitive quarters and
highest levels of national life, . . . amounting to an extended, authorita-
tive, and capillary apparatus of persons which Gelli, in his capacity as
Venerable Master of P-2, could dispose at will." P-2 membership rolls
included three cabinet ministers; 43 generals; eight admirals, including
the head of the armed forces; the heads of the three intelligence services;
43 Military Policemen; the police chiefs of Italy's four main cities; the
mayors of Brescia and Pavia; the editor of Italy's leading newspaper,

49 The Parliamentary Commission implied thai the shift in strategy was more complete
than it was in fact. A new two-track strategy is more plausible and more compatible with
subsequent events. It is noteworthy, for example, that a December 1985 Bologna court in-
dictment named Gelli as one of the organizers of the Bologna bombing of 1980.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the Corriere delta Sera; 36 members of Parliament and members of
numerous state agencies." The number of P-2 members in the state ad-
ministration totalled 422. Especially important in the view of the Par-
liamentary Commission was P-2 infiltration into the Italian Treasury
and those institutions involved in foreign trade. P-2 also penetrated the
prestigious Bank of Italy, an institution with important overseas connec-
tions."

The "silent coup" also targeted Italy's mass media. One of Gelli's
most important successes was the takeover of the Rizzoli publishing
group. Rizzoli controlled the leading Italian newspaper, the Corriere
delta Sera of Milan," whose daily sales of 500,000 were the highest in
all Italy. At its zenith the Rizzoli publishing group was printing one in
four Italian newspapers. The Gelli-P-2 Group also acquired control or
important influence over many local newspapers, including // Mattino,
Sport Sud, II Piccolo, Eco di Padova, II Giornale di Sicilia, Alto Adige,
and // Lavoro. Gelli and P-2 used this influence within the media, ac-
cording to the Parliamentary Report, for the "coordination of the entire
provincial and local press, so as to control public opinion throughout the
country."

Gelli's influence over the Corriere delta Sera and other newspapers,
his intimate ties with the Italian secret services, and his influence in al-
most every major Italian institution, revealed "the general line of an
alarming, comprehensive plan for the penetration and conditioning of
national life."

50 . A partial list of P-2 membership i n (he Iralian slate sector i n 1 979 i s as follows: In-
terior Ministry: 19 members; Ministry of Foreign Affairs: 4; Ministry of Public Works: 4;
Ministry of Public Instruction: 32; Ministry of State: 2 1 ; Treasury: 67; Ministry of Health:
3; Ministry of Industry and Commerce: 1 3; Finance Ministry: 52; Ministry of Justice, in-
cluding Magistratura: 2 1 ; Ministry of Cultural Affairs: 4; Ministry of Scientific and Tech-
nological Research: 3; Ministry of Transportation: 2.

5 1 . Other major banks targeted for the establishment of strategic P-2 contacts in the in-
ternational banking and business community were the Banca Nacionale del Lavoro, the
Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the Banca Toscana. the Istituto Centrale delle casse rurali et
artigiani, the Interbanca. the Banca di Roma, and the Banco Ambrosiano.

52. Corriere delta Sera had fallen under the control of Banco Ambrosiano, whose pres-
ident, Roberto Calvi, was a P-2 member and major financier of P-2 projects. Upon P-2's
acquisition of the Corriere, its editor, Piero Ottone, a thorn in the side of both the
Socialist and Christian Democratic Parties in Italy for many years, was replaced by his
deputy, Franco Di Bella. When the P-2 house of cards fell in 1981, the records showed
that Di Bella had been a member of the P-2 lodge since October 10, 1978. Calvi, of
course, was the leading figure in the Vatican banking scandal of the late 1970s, and mil-
lions of dollars passed through his hands to rightwing dictators in Latin America.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

As for the "Bulgarian Connection," would the members of the an-
ticommunist brotherhood of P-2 be capable of concocting a case against
the arch-enemy that would involve falsifying evidence? Were they in a
position to do this by their reach into the police, secret services, the
press, the judiciary, political parties, and the state apparatus? These
questions were not explored in the western media; the quality of the Ital-
ian police-security establishment, with its deep roots in Italian fascist
history, is off the western agenda.

The "Strategy of Tension" . The "strategy of tension" was a right wing
creation, put into extensive practice beginning in the late 1 960s by the
"party of the coup." 51 The strategy was based on the idea that terrorist
acts, if carried out by secret agents in a political environment where the
acts would be attributed to the Left, would be serviceable to right wing
and fascist ends. The point was to make people very apprehensive and
insecure, to put them in a mood to support a regime of law and order.
This would be facilitated if the police, courts, and press regularly failed
to identify correctly the perpetrators of violence, and allowed them-
selves to be manipulated into false attributions of its source.

Many of the proponents and implementers of the strategy were open
fascists, aiming explicitly for a totalitarian solution. (The journalist
Guido Giannettini, for example, who was employed by the Italian secret
services, called himself a "nazi-fascist," not just a plain fascist. 54 )
Mussolini's coup of 1922 and the Greek fascist takeover of 1967 were
models for this "party ." The Parliamentary Report on P-2 comments:

P-2 contributed to the so-called strategy of tension, that was pursued by right-
wing extremist groups in Italy during those years when the purpose was to de-
stabilize Italian politics, creating a situation that such groups might be able to ex-

53. The expression "strategy of tension" has been widely used in the Italian media to
describe the attempt by right wing forces to stop the leftward trend in Italian politics by the
use of force. While there is little dispute about the reality of the actions carried out in sup-
port of this political objective, there is debate over the degree of explicit planning and or-
ganization of the whole process, and the exact composition of the forces involved. P-2
contributed to a centralizing tendency in the implementation of the strategy, but much of it
seems to have been informal and loosely coordinated

54 Christie, op cil.. n. 19, p vii. Giannettini was greatly appreciated by the U S mil-
itary establishment. In November 1961 he was brought to the United States to conduct a
three-day seminar on "The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d'Etat in Europe" at the
U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Christie, ibid., p. 26; De Lutiis, op cil.,
n. 25, p. 164.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ploit in their own interest to bring about an authoritarian solution to Italy's prob-
lems ... to condition political and public opinion that changes were demanded
and radical solutions possible . . . with the overthrow of the democratic repub-
lic a real alternative among various possible outcomes.

The strategy of tension was implemented through a series of mas-
sacres, frameups, and abortive coup attempts. Prior to 1969 there had
been numerous fascist attacks on Communists, unionists, and demon-
strators, but no major terrorist attacks. The new strategy of massacre
began in April 1969 with bomb explosions at the University of Padua
and a Milan industrial fair. On August 8, 1 969, bombs were placed in
ten trains moving out of major stations, injuring ten people. Then in
Milan on December 12, 1969, a bomb was placed in a bank on market
day in the crowded Piazza Fontana. Sixteen people died and 90 more
were injured. A bomb placed in another bank in the center of Milan was
discovered before it could go off. Three bombs were set off in Rome,
one of which injured 13 people. Subsequently, there were other mas-
sacres by the instruments of the party of the coup: The most notorious
and "productive" were the December 17, 1973 rocket attack on a Pan
Am plane at Rome's Fiumicano airport, killing 32; the May 28, 1974
bombing at an antifascist rally in Brescia, killing eight and injuring 102;
the August 4, 1974 bombing of the Rome-Munich Italicus train near
Bologna, killing 1 2 and injuring 48; and the Bologna station bombing of
August 2, 1980, which left 85 dead and 200 injured.

The evidence is overwhelming that these terrorist acts were carried
out by fascists in collusion with members of the security services." But

55. I( is a cliche of (he U.S. Right, uncontested in the Unitad States, that Italian ter-
rorism is a predominantly leftwing phenomenon. This is based on major fabrications A
favorite author cited by the U.S. Right to authenticate their position is Dr. Vittorfranco S.
Pisano, whose study, "Terrorism and Security: The Italian Experience," was published
as a Report of the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism in November 1984
Pisano states that neofascist terror is not even a close runner-up to Red terror in Italy
Among other reasons for this is the alleged fact that "the terrorist right lacks the suppor-
tive structure available to its leftist counterpart" (p. 35). This chapter demonstrates that
Pisano's assertion is a fabrication: The "terrorist right" in Italy has had the support not
only of P-2. with its extensive institutional ramifications, but also the Italian intelligence
services, carabinieri, and officers of the regular armed forces, who are in turn linked in
various supportive ways to the CIA and NATO (see below).

It is also interesting that Pisano carefully avoids breaking down terrorist incidents in
Italy by allocation to the Left and Right. He does give an appendix table showing terrorist
incidents by year, 1 968-82 (p. 63). The grand total of deaths by terror shown on his
table is 334. The terrorist deaths allocable to neofascists based on the incidents mentioned
on this page alone, which hardly exhausts the neofascist total, amounts to 151 or 45% of

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

in accordance with the logic of the strategy of tension, they were blamed
on the Left. The Piazza Fontana bombing, for example, was im-
mediately blamed on the anarchists, a diverse and weak group that was
an easy victim of a well-managed conspiracy of the Right. The police,
secret services, judiciary, and press all played their roles in this frameup.
The local anarchist leader Giuseppi Pinelli died in police custody, an al-
leged "suicide." Although the evidence was soon clear that the Piazza
Fontana bombing was a rightist strategy of tension action, 56 it has never
been possible to bring the perpetrators (or the police who murdered
Pinelli) to justice.

The main reason for this is that the strategy of tension was im-
plemented and protected by important elements of the state apparatus.
Franco Ferraresi points out, for example, that in a judicial investigation
at Arezzo of the Italicus bombing, it was disclosed that "some fascists"
among the accused actually worked for the police or secret services. It
was also disclosed that they received valuable information on the prog-
ress of the investigation being carried out against them, and that Gelli
had connections with key officials in the repressive apparatus of
Arezzo." Ferraresi adds that "Not by chance, in the course of the inves-
tigation the accused [spoke] repeatedly of the links between SID, the P-
2 lodge, MSI [the Italian neofascist party], and elements of the Right in
Arezzo." 5 '

The Italian Intelligence Services and Rightwing Terrorism

Given the importance of the Italian secret services in the development
of the Bulgarian Connection case, and the assertions by Albano and
Martella that these services were apolitical and quite trustworthy, 59 it

[he grand total. If we added in other clearly neofascist killings, we would well exceed half
the total deaths by terrorism. It is clear why Pisano fails to make any count by political
class of terrorist.

56. See Christie, op. cil., n. 19. pp. 61-63, and the text below.

57. Gelli's connections included "magistrates (one of whom, the Attorney Marsili, was
his son-in-law), an assistant chief of police and the leader of the CC [carabinien], not to
mention the national leadership of SID which was partly involved also (Gen. Miceli) in
the Borghese affair . and in the Rose of the Winds plan." Ferraresi, op. cil., n 40, p.
107.

58. Ibid.

59. See especially the remark of Albano cited in Chapter 7, p. 191; also the discussion
of Martella's views in Chapter 5, pp. 1 17-18.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

may be useful to provide further and more detailed evidence of the secu-
rity services' involvement in rightwing terrorism. In this connection, we
should note first the virtual unanimity of informed Italian opinion of the
generality of such involvement. Luciano Violante, a member of the Ital-
ian Parliament and former Magistrate of the Court of Turin, has stated
that "One cannot say that there has been a single important episode of
black [i.e., rightwing] terrorism that does not involve in some way or
another men who are either directly or indirectly connected to the ser-
vices. " 60 Stefano Rodota, also a member of Parliament and Professor of
Law at the University of Rome, has said the same thing: "Traces, some
heavy, some light, of direct actions or of involvement of the services are
evident in all the judicial decisions that relate to the more serious acts of
terrorism (especially black): the massacre of the Piazza Fontana; of the
Piazza Delia Loggia; of the Italicus train; of the Bologna station; the
Rose of Winds affair; the Borghese coup." 6 ' As noted above, the
Arezzo investigations revealed that a number of the suspects worked for
the carabinieri, police, and secret services. An internal document of the
intelligence agency SID indicates that Stefano delle Chiaie himself —
mastermind of the Bologna bombing and an associate of Klaus Barbie —
was "an informer of the Rome central police" with contacts also in the
Ministry of Interior. 62

Experts on Italian terrorism have also noted the frequent failure of the
security services to disclose or do anything about advance knowledge of
terrorist actions. From the beginning of the implementation of the strat-
egy of tension in the late 1960s, the secret services successfully infil-
trated both right and left groups that were later accused of crimes, but
failed to prevent any terrorist acts. According to Giovanni Tamburino,
Magistrate of Padua and a member of the Superior Council of Magis-
trates, "Those close to the victims of the massacre which occurred on
August 2, 1980 in the station in Bologna lamented the fact that the ser-
vices, despite having prior warning of the disaster, did not act on this
knowledge, nor did they pass the information on to the magistrate after
the massacre had taken place." 63

60. Luciano Violante, "Politica delta sicurezza, relazioni internationali e terrorismo,"
in Gianfranco Pasquino, ed . La prova Delle Armi (Istituto Cattaneo, Bologna: Societa
Editrice II Mulino. 1984), p 100.

61. Stefano Rodota, "La riposta dello stato al terrorismo: gli apparati," in Pasquino,
ed., op. cit., n. 60, p. 82.

62. Linklater, el al., op. cit., n. 12, p. 207.

63 Giovanni Tamburino, "Le stragi e il loro contesto," in Paolo Corsini and Laura
Novati, eds , L'Eversione Nera: Cronache Di Un Decennio. 1974-1984 (Milan: Franco
Angeli, 1985), p. 142.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

A related feature of secret services involvement in rightwing ter-
rorism has been their protection of the terrorists and refusal to cooper-
ate with the judicial system. Five days after the Piazza Fontana bomb-
ing, for example, SID circulated a note to its branch offices stating flatly
that delle Chiaie had organized the attack, and that his man Mario Mer-
lino, who had infiltrated the anarchists, had actually planted the bomb.
But SID failed to pass this information on to the magistrates in charge of
the case. 6 * A powerful statement of the same point was made by Rosario
Minna, Magistrate of the Court of Florence, in a recent volume on ter-
rorism in Italy. According to Minna: 63

The classic example ... of a web which indissolubly links together both the
bottom and the top of the Italian power structure in its relations with black ter-
rorism concerns the help given by the Italian secret services to the accused in the
trial for the massacre of Piazza Fontana. Giannettini was helped Financially
when he escaped abroad; worse still, after the Magistrate of Milan had requested
the arrest of Pozzan, ... the Italian services took Pozzan to Spain, where they
handed him over to delle Chiaie in Madrid, at a time when delle Chiaie himself
was a fugitive from justice, wanted for the very same massacre of Piazza Fon-
tana. So far, there has been no news of administrative or political sanctions
against those officials who betrayed the state by these critical actions. There-
fore, it is practically impossible that it was a matter of personal and improvised
initiative on the part of a captain or general.

The network protecting terrorists in Italy extended far. In the Italicus
case, the neofascist party MSI actually funded the terrorist killers. Ad-
miral Birindelli, a past president of MSI, 66 apparently not liking this
support of deadly terrorist actions, reported the MSI role to the
carabinieri within several weeks of the massacre. This important infor-
mation took seven years to reach the magistrates in charge of the case. 67
In attempting to understand why this delay occurred, we need only re-
call that the carabinieri as well as the secret services were heavily infil-
trated by P-2, and the head of the carabinieri to whom Birindelli gave
his information was a P-2 member.

64. Linklaler, et at., op. cit., n. 12, p. 207.

65. Rosario Minna, "II terrorismo di deslra," in Donatella della Porta, ed.. Terrorism!
in Italia (Islituto Cattaneo, Bologna: Societa Edilrice II Mulino, 1984). p. 57.

66. And also a former Mediterranean NATO commander

67. Ferraresi, op cit., n. 40, p 107

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Stefano delle Chiaie was a principal in many major terrorist attacks in
Italy between 1969 and 1980. He is almost certainly responsible for
more deaths by violence than Carlos the Jackal. We have seen, how-
ever, that delle Chiaie attended the Pollia Institute Conference of 1965,
was an informer for the Italian police, and was used by the secret ser-
vices as a friendly vehicle to help spirit wanted criminals out of the
country. Delle Chiaie also had ties with Federico D' Amato, the head of
the Italian internal security service SISDE. 6 " It is frequently pointed out
in Italy that delle Chiaie has a charmed life. In 1984 the new head of
SISDE, Vicente Parisi, updated the Italian Parliament on the Bologna
massacre. Journalist Maurizio De Luca summarizes his remarks as fol-
lows: 6 *

He spoke inevitably about delle Chiaie, and the nearly legendary impossibility
of capturing him. It is known that delle Chiaie has traveled, and still does, in
South and Central America quite undisturbed. Parisi explicitly said that the fas-
cist leader is evidently given great protection First of all by the South American
secret services. This implies that somebody else, more powerful, allows this
protection. Who? Somebody asked Parisi openly, is it a superpower? In other
words, are there American interests protecting delle Chiaie? Parisi, expressing
himself very cautiously, seemed to imply so. He pointed out that the American
secret service had given very inadequate help to their Italian counterparts in at-
tempting to capture delle Chiaie. Given this situation, the committee overseeing
the secret services decided to write to Craxi to take an official stand toward the
nations who protect delle Chiaie, starting with the South American nations.

This interesting exchange was not reported in the mainstream U. S.
press. Martin Lee and Kevin Coogan point out that the U.S. Customs
Service was apparently aware of the fact that delle Chiaie had entered
Miami on a plane from South America on September 9, 1982, traveling
with Abdullah Catli, a leader of the Gray Wolves and friend of Agca.™
He was not apprehended, and the Italian government was not informed
of his whereabouts.

If Carlos the Jackal could be shown to be an informer for the Bulgar-
ians or KGB, used by them as an intermediary and in other business re-
lations, and allowed to move about freely in their territory and client

68. De Lutiis, op. cit., n. 25, pp. 98-100.

69. "Operazione Primula Nera," L'Espresso, August 5, 1984.

70. Quoted in Martin A. Lee and Kevin Coogan, "The Agca Con," Village Voice, De-
cember 24, 1985. Pazienza told Lee and Coogan that customs officers informed him that
"delle Chiaie enters and leaves the United States as he likes."

FOUR: THE ROME- WASHINGTON CONNECTION

states, politicians and press in the West would shriek with indignation
and pound tables over eastern Bloc "support of terrorists." Delle
Chiaie, however, has been a "strategy of tension" activist and a sub
rosa western "asset." The West accommodates well to his differences
from Carlos."

Corruption Unlimited: SISMI, Pazienza, and Company

The abuses of the secret services recounted above had deep structural
roots in Italian society and in the American-NATO connection, and they
continued into the period of the genesis and implementation of the Bul-
garian Connection. On July 29, 1985, the Criminal Court of Rome is-
sued a 184-page report and "Sentenza" (hereafter. Judgment) against
Francesco Pazienza, Pietro Musumeci, Giuseppi Belmonte, and others
for crimes committed while serving as high officials and agents of
SISMI." They were found guilty of embezzlement and corruption, but
many of their crimes have larger implications and bear on the Bulgarian
Connection case. They show an intelligence service out of control, car-
rying out fraudulent and illegal acts, and manipulated for personal and
political purposes.

Among the crimes enumerated in the Judgment, we may note the fol-
lowing:

7 1 . British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher illustrates well the western pattern or dis-
crimination and hypocrisy. Speaking before the American Bar Association in July 1985,
Mrs. Thatcher stated that "We need action — action to which all countries are committed
until the terrorist knows that he has no haven and no escape." Two weeks earlier, Mrs.
Thatcher had ignored an impassioned plea from Prime Minister Craxi for heraid in obtain-
ing the deportation of Italian rightwing terrorists, who had found a safe haven in England.
The particular case arousing Craxi's ire involved Roberto Fiore, a leading member of the
Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, convicted in 1984 of subversive conspiracy, attempted
murder, armed robbery, and six counts of arson. The Home Office has rejected Italian ap-
peals for Fiore's extradition on the ground that European Community Law requires that it
be shown "that his personal conduct was such as to constitute a present threat to one of the
fundamental interests of society." Apparently a rightwing terrorist does not meet this
standard by his terrorist record alone. Are we to presume that Carlos would also be safe in
England on this ground? See Mark Hollingsworth, "Fascist prosecutes journalist," New
Statesman, November 15, 1985, p. 5

72. Criminal Court of Rome, Judgment in the Matter of Francesco Pazienza, et at. ,
July 29, 1985, signed by Francesco Amato, President of the Court.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Forgery. Pazienza arranged for Che forgery of a document carrying the
signatures of Licio Gelli and others, which was planted in the May 8,
1981 issue of Agenzia RepubblicaP He either forged or passed along
fraudulent papers supposedly showing that the then President of Italy,
Pertini, had been on the Soviet payroll!" Articles secretly subsidized by
SISMI smearing various other individuals were planted in the press. 75
One forgery described in the Judgment was of "Letters of Information"
about terrorist plans, allegedly obtained from a secret source that was
paid a large sum of money for the information. The court concluded that
the Letters were fabricated and the source did not exist, and that the pur-
pose of the entire process was to allow Musumeci, Belmonte, and San-
tovito to divert large sums to their own pockets. 76

Political manipulation. Pazienza attempted to split the Communist
Party by supporting a hard line pro-Soviet faction within the PCI. He
engaged in this effort as an agent of SISMI, although he sought external
(mainly American) financing to advance the project. 77 Santovito ac-
knowledged to a Parliamentary Commission on P-2 that SISMI had
worked hard to try to pin some link to the Bulgarians on the PCI. 78
Numerous other efforts to enhance or denigrate favored or disfavored
politicians, movements, or countries are recounted in the Judgment.
(One of them, the "Billygate Affair," we discuss below.)

Improper dealings with terrorists. The Judgment describes in detail how,
after the Red Brigades had kidnapped the Christian Qemocratic politi-
cian Ciro Cirillo, Pazienza used his contacts with the Mafia to negotiate
a deal that was extremely generous to both the Mafia intermediaries and
the Red Brigades. The Court felt that the mode of dealing with the ter-
rorists was highly inappropriate, and that in this kind of operation
Pazienza was doing things "of incredible danger to society. . . .""The
Court concluded that "An operation which began as an attempt

73. Ibid., p. 102.

74. Ibid., p. 103.

75. Ibid., pp 99-102.

76. Ibid., pp. 1 19-73. Bruno Di Murro declared tothe court that the "Pazienza group"
took sums amounting to about one billion two hundred million lire from the coffers of
SISMI between October 1980 and May 1981. Ibid., p. 169.

77. Ibid., p. 108

78. Italian Parliamentary Committee of Investigation into the P-2 Masonic Lodge,
Documentation Vol. 3, Tome XIX, March 2, 1982, p. 202.

79. Judgment, p. 26

FOUR: THE ROME- WASHINGTON CONNECTION

to find the kidnapped man and lo single out his captors . . . turned into
an operation characterized by the payment of a very heavy ransom to a
terroristic group which would take advantage of it to carry on further
their aggression against the state." 80

Protection of criminals and terrorists. The Court charged Pazienza with
using a SISMI plane to transport a man wanted for crimes out of the
country. 81 SISMI officials were also charged with giving investigating
bodies information which they knew to be untrue about terrorists al-
legedly involved in the Bologna bombing, thereby diverting the investi-
gation away from the real terrorists. 82

In early December 1985, magistrates in Bologna issued 16 arrest war-
rants, accusing both Licio Gelli and former SISMI officials Pazienza,
Belmonte, and Musumeci of "subversive association with the aim of
terrorism" in connection with the Bologna bombing of 1980. Initial
newspaper reports indicate that the secret service officials were being
charged not merely with covering up the massacre, but with involve-
ment in its overall planning. 83

Disinformation. In early 1981, from information provided by Pazienza
and an "external collaborator," two reports were prepared by SISMI
tying the drug and arms traffic to Arabs and Bulgaria. The Judgment im-
plies that these reports were fabricated, intended to divert attention
away from SISMI's ongoing abuses by providing evidence of energetic
secret service activity. It is possible that the "external collaborator" in
this case was Michael Ledeen (see below). It is also noteworthy that the
Bulgarians are already being introduced as villains in these pre-May 13,
1981 reports.

The Ledeen-Pazienza Connection. The Judgment devotes considerable
space to the coordinated operations of Pazienza and Michael Ledeen.
Pazienza was an operator of international scope, with significant re-
lationships and mutual service extending especially to France and the
United States. The Judgment alleges that Pazienza was on the payroll of
the French secret services. 84 (It was well-known that he was a close

80. Ibid , p. 18.

81. Ibid., p. 25.

82. Ibid., pp. 147-68.

83. See the series of articles in La Repubblica, December 12-13, 1985.

84. "From a reading of the quoted documents one can deduce the superior position that

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

friend of its head, Comte Alexandre de Marenches.) He had also estab-
lished a relationship with Alexander Haig, which added to his authority
in Italy (see further below).

Pazienza was also a good friend of Licio Gelli, and provided his pri-
vate yacht to help Gelli flee after his escape from prison. He was also a
close associate of Roberto Calvi, the murdered head of Banco Am-
brosiano. Before his death Calvi had swindled more than a billion dol-
lars through a complex chain of bank transactions that deeply involved
P-2 and the Vatican Bank. Pazienza helped Calvi try to extricate himself
from his difficulties, then to take refuge as the Banco Ambrosiano crisis
reached its peak. He also introduced Calvi to Flavio Carboni, the last
man known to have seen Calvi alive. 85

At the time of Agca's assassination attempt, SISMI was headed by
General Giuseppe Santovito, a P-2 member and Pazienza's patron. Dur-
ing Santovito's tenure Pazienza was a SISMI operative with extraordi-
nary powers. In fact, the Judgment suggests that Pazienza even con-
trolled Santovito. 86 Pazienza was not only Santovito's top aide, he was
also the dominant individual in a small group of secret service "plumb-
ers" called "Super S," made up of P-2 members, which used the re-
sources of SISMI, and was answerable only to Santovito. 87

Michael Ledeen enters the picture as a rightwing journalist, longtime
associate of Claire Sterling, 88 friend of Alexander Haig, and the "Italy
expert" in the Reagan transition team of 1 980-8 1. 8 * In tandem with
Pazienza, Ledeen was well placed to help forward Reagan's political
aims in Italy at the time of the assassination attempt against the Pope. At
least as early as 1980 Ledeen became a friend of and collaborator with
Pazienza. Perhaps through Pazienza's influence Ledeen worked for

Pazienza — already on the payroll of the French secret military service and connected with
centers of foreign powers [the U.S. State Department is mentioned specifically] — had
managed to acquire in the security organization." Judgment, p. 37.

85. On Pazienza and Calvi, see Rupert Comwell, God's Banker (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1984).

86 Judgment, pp 30-33.

87 Ibid., pp. 34-40. Valuable details are also given in Sandro Acciari and Pietro
Calderoni. "C'ero io, c'era Pazienza, c'era . . . ," L' Espresso, November 1 1 , 1984; and
Diana Johnstone, "Latest scandal leads to Reagan administration," InTheseTimes, De-
cember 5-1 I, 1984.

88 See Chapter 6, p. 160

89 During the early years of the Reagan administration he was also a consultant to the
State Department and Pentagon "Italian Officials Finger Ledeen, CIA," CoveriAction
Information Bulletin, Number 22 (Fall 1984), p. 41.

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

SISMI and was placed on its payroll. 90 He had the coded identification,
Z-3." Ledeen received at least $120,000 plus expenses from SISMI in
1980-81 , some of which he funneled into a Bermuda bank account." 2 He
received the money for various services: what he vaguely calls "risk as-
sessment," helping train Italian intelligence agents, 93 and providing
analyses of terrorism and the Soviet threat. The Italian press reported
that Ledeen actually sold old U.S. intelligence reports to SISMI at stiff
prices, which Santovito then passed on to Italian officials as the prod-
ucts of secret and original SISMI investigations. According to Diana
Johnstone, Italian journalists to whom these secret reports were leaked
were not fooled, and "found them an unconvincing rehash of old gos-
sip, such as the notion that the Italian Communist Party was really run
by a secret 'parallel' hierarchy commanded by Moscow." 94 The docu-
ments did further the echo-chamber effect, however, providing Italian
intelligence service "confirmation" of the truths that U.S. disinfor-
mationists were purveying widely.

An important collaboration between Ledeen and Pazienza involved
the so-called "Billygate" affair. Italian investigators had already shown
that SISMI, Pazienza, and Michael Ledeen, working through Super S,
lured President Jimmy Carter's brother Billy into a compromising re-
lationship with Qaddafi during the 1980 presidential campaign. Accord-
ing to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, prosecuting Judge
Domenico Sica had evidence "that SISMI was the architect of the scan-
dal over Billy Carter," and that the material in the case "was gathered
mostly by Pazienza and by his American friend Michael Ledeen." The
indictment against Pazienza explicitly mentioned Michael Ladeen as a
co-conspirator in the illegal activities attributed to Pazienza. La Repub-
blica went on to say: 95

Pazienza availed himself of SISMI both for the use of some secret agents and for

90. This point was confirmed by Santovito, the head of SISMI. Judgment, p 1 10.

91. Ibid., p. 39

92 Jonathan Kwilny, "Tale of Intrigue: Why an Italian Spy Got Closely Involved In
the Billygate Affair," Wail Street Journal, August 8, 1985

93 The Judgment describes an "Operation Training Camps," in which Ledeen re-
ceived 300 million lire for organizing training camps on antiguerrilla-anticommunist war-
fare. Pazienza claimed that part of the sum was his. but Ledeen kept the entire amount for
himself. Judgment, p. 109

94. Diana Johnstone, "A method to Agca's madness?," In These Times, July 10-23,
1985.

95. Quoted in Johnstone, ibid

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the expenses of organizing the scandalous plan. It seems that the organizers got
a huge payoff for "Billygate." Moreover, Santovito and Pazienza got great ad-
vantages in return from American officials, in fact may have been helped in
other obscure affairs. The "Billygate" operation did not come under SlSMI's
institutionally mandated task, and for that reason Judge Sica brought charges of
pursuing private interest through official activities.

SISMI provided the tape recorder and hired a photographer to take pic-
tures of Billy Carter with a Libyan representative.'* As the enterprise
was strictly in aid of Reagan's election campaign, the Court did not con-
sider this a proper use of Italian secret service resources.

After Reagan's election Ledeen and his friend Pazienza became more
powerful in Italy. Umberto D'Amato, a high police official in Italy,
claims that in the uncertain conditions prevailing during the Reagan
transition, "there was an interregnum during which relations between
Italy and the United States were carried on in the persons of the duo
Pazienza-Ledeen.'"" The influential position of the Ledeen-Pazienza
team is suggested by their role as intermediaries between Italian politi-
cians and high officials wanting to make contact with officials of the
new Reagan administration. Even the Italian Foreign Minister Emilio
Colombo used their services in making arrangements for a visit. The
head of the Christian Democratic Party, Flaminio Piccoli, testified be-
fore a Parliamentary Committee that during a visit to Washington, after
several days of futile attempts to visit Secretary of State Haig, General
Santovito suggested that he seek out Pazienza. Jonathan Kwitny reports
that "Mr. Piccoli testified that one phone call from Mr. Pazienza to a
contact persuaded Mr. Haig to postpone a trip to Camp David to help
President Reagan with a major speech, and grant Mr. Piccoli a 43-
minute meeting." 98

In August 1981, following the P-2 scandal of the previous spring,
General Santovito was dismissed as head of SISMI, and Pazienza's role
in SISMI was greatly reduced. Pazienza claims that he resigned from
SISMI in March 1981, more than a month before the attack on the
Pope.** He also alleges that the successor to Santovito, General Nino

96. Judgment, pp. 81-86.

97. Quoted in Sandro Acciari and Pietro Calderoni, "C'ero io, c"era Pazienza. Cera
. . ." L'Espresso, November II, 1984.

98. Jonathan Kwilny, "Tales of Intrigue: How an Italian Ex-Spy Who Also Helped
U.S. Landed in Prison Here," Wall Street Journal. August 7, 1985. For corroborating
evidence of this account, see Judgment, p. 86.

99. The P-2 scandal originated in the discovery of Gelli's list of secret members of P-2

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

Lugaresi, and other members of SISMI, were the ones who actually
coached Agca. According to Pazienza, Michael Ledeen had worked
with Col. Sportelli and the SISMI chief of station in New York, Col.
Marcello Campione, both of whom remained after the departure of San-
tovito. Pazienza claims that not only did the successor team coach
Agca, they also collaborated with Ledeen in questioning the former
Czech General and disinformationist Jan Sejna, whose fabrications were
channeled from Ledeen to Claire Sterling. 100

Thus, there was no general housecleaning of SISMI, and there is no
reason to believe that the fundamental character of SISMI was altered.
In fact, several of the remaining SISMI officials were subsequently ar-
rested for involvement in the drug trade. Furthermore, while Pazienza
has attempted to shift some of the accusations against SISMI and him-
self to his former colleagues and successors, his own role in the Bulga-
rian Connection is still far from clear. Soon after his exit from SISMI,
Pazienza and former high SISMI official Pietro Musumeci organized a
security consulting firm, which was quickly employed by Roberto Calvi
and his Banco Ambrosiano. Pazienza then became very active in help-
ing Calvi manage the bank's investments in and contacts with the Italian
political parties. This gave him fresh resources, including closer rela-
tions with Socialist Party head Bettino Craxi, who visited Pazienza at
the latter's house. Craxi's Socialist Party had been heavily financed by
illegal contributions from Calvi's bank from 1975, and Craxi had been
Calvi 's stout defender when Banco Ambrosiano' s misdeeds began to be
uncovered in the late 1970s. 101

Pazienza' s Mafia ties were also important. Following the kidnapping
of the Christian Democratic official Ciro Cirillo by the Red Brigades in
1981, Pazienza was brought in by the police to negotiate for Cirillo's
ransom. Pazienza was able to negotiate Cirillo's release through his
contacts with Raeffele Cutolo, the leader of the Naples Camorra
(Mafia). According to the June 16, 1985 statement of former Cutolo as-

in a police raid of March 17, 1981 It is possible (hat pressure on P-2 members and their
close associates began shortly after that date, although Santovito did not leave SISMI until
August 1981.

Pazienza's claims were spelled out in a letter from him to Christian Roulette, which was
introduced by Roulette into the trial record in January 1986 The contents of the letter are
summarized by Diana Johnstone in "Bulgarian Connection: Finger-pointing in the pontiff
plot labyrinth," In These Times, January 29-February 4, 1986.

100. See Chapter 6, pp 135-36

101 Comwell, op cil., n. 85, pp. 114. 141

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

sociate Giovanni Pandico, 102 when Cutolo was threatened with a transfer
out of Ascoli Piceno prison in 1982 — with the implication that Cutolo
might be killed during the transfer — Cutolo contacted Pazienza and
Musumeci to help extricate him from his fix. Pandico claimed that
Musumeci visited Ascoli Piceno prison in late February or early March
1982, 103 and struck a deal: Cutolo would stay in Ascoli Piceno, but he
would help persuade Agca to implicate the Bulgarians and Soviets in the
plot to assassinate the Pope.

Ledeen, Pazienza, SISMI, and the Bulgarian Connection

As we have seen, recent investigations of the Italian secret services in
general, and SISMI and the Ledeen-Pazienza-SISMI connection in par-
ticular, have uncovered a wide variety of suggestive facts and relation-
ships that bear on the emergence of the Bulgarian Connection. First, it is
clear that SISMI and other Italian intelligence agencies have long been
infiltrated and even dominated by P-2 members and the extreme Right.
These groups have been associated for many years with attempts to sub-
vert Italian democracy, to weaken and destroy the Left by means of a
"strategy of tension," and, if need be, to organize a coup to install a
government of law and order. It is apparent that agencies like SISMI
have been thoroughly politicized and have spent considerable effort pur-
suing covert political strategies.

Second, there is substantial evidence that SISMI had little scruple in
serving up forged documents, disseminating them, and planting them on
its political enemies. On May 19, 1981, only six days after the assassi-
nation attempt on the Pope, SISMI circulated a secret report within the
government claiming that the shooting of the Pope had been decided
upon and announced at a meeting of Warsaw Pact military leaders in
Rumania by Soviet Minister of Defense Marshal Ustinov in November
1980. This fabricated document is now part of the evidence in the case
against Pazienza and others and has been impounded by the Italian
courts.' 04 An associate of Pazienza' s, Francesco Mazzola, then Italian

102. Pietro Calderoni, "Cella con Servizi," L'Espresso, June 23, 1985. This was
based on an exclusive interview with Pandico.

103. Pandico told Calderoni the visit took place on March 1 , but in his trial testimony
Pandico changed this to sometime in February.

104 See discussion and citations in Report of the International Commission of Study
and Information on "The Antonov Affair" (Brussels: International Association or Demo-

FOUR: THE ROME-WASHINGTON CONNECTION

Under Secretary for Security, was the first Italian official to refer pub-
licly to a "Bulgarian Connection." 105 In short, Italian intelligence had
fabricated a KGB plot and was already disseminating it long before
Agca made his first serious claims of Bulgarian involvement. 106

Third, SISMI was honeycombed with corruption in the 1970s and
early 1980s. In addition to the matters dealt with in the Judgment,
Pazienza was deeply involved in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal. He is
now wanted in Italy for, among other things, arranging a $3 million loan
to an Italian construction company, whose top official used $2 million
for personal ends, with Pazienza drawing a $250,000 finder's fee. We
have mentioned Pazienza's numerous Mafia contacts. Santovito and
several of his associates were eventually arrested and convicted for ac-
tive participation in the drug and arms traffic. Some of these transac-
tions even involved cooperation with the Turkish Gray Wolves to trans-
port contraband goods across Bulgaria.' 07 This relationship between
SISMI and the Gray Wolves may have helped induce Agca to cooperate
in the manufacture of the Bulgarian Connection.

Finally, SISMI was exceedingly amenable to serving as an errand boy
for U.S. officials. We have mentioned the longstanding dependency on
the CIA, reflecting the larger and deeper dependency of the Italian elite
on U.S. power. The Billygate case, with Ledeen, Pazienza, and SISMI
working together in the service of the Reagan election campaign, and
manipulating the Italian media and political environment with money
and the resources of an important intelligence agency, is suggestive.
"Billygate" was a model of what can be done in the way of setting
somebody up for a media coup, using the power available to U.S.
agents and their Italian allies. It takes little imagination to contemplate
the possibility that this duo or their numerous associates in the Italian in-
telligence agencies and police might have worked out a way to take ad-
vantage of Agca's presence in jail and his visit to Bulgaria.

cratic Lawyers, 1985), pp. 20-21 . If this document were not a forgery, we may be sure
that it would have been introduced into evidence by Martella and his colleagues much ear-
lier.

105. He made his statement in an interview on Thames Television, T V. Eye, on Sep-
tember 3, 1 98 1 . A consultant to the producers of the program was Paul Henze. Two days
after the broadcast Henze delivered his report on the Bulgarian Connection to Reader's
Digest, which then proceeded to hire Claire Sterling to investigate the "Connection "

106. As we note elsewhere in the text, Agca mentioned the Bulgarians very early, but
superficially and along with a large number of other implausible claims.

107. "La P-2, les service italiens, le trafic drogues/armes: 1'attentatcontrc lepapeet la
CIA," Le Monde du Renseignemem. October-December 1983. pp. 43-45

100

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Craxi and the Politics of the Bulgarian Connection

There is intense hostility and conflict between the Italian Communist
Party and the Socialist Party and Christian Democrats. It is obvious that
a successful linking of the Bulgarians and Soviet Union to the assassina-
tion attempt against the Pope would be a severe blow to the Communist
Party and the Left. Socialist Minister of Defense Lagorio stated to the
Italian Parliament that the attempted assassination attempt by Bulgaria
was a ' 'declaration of war. ' ' And the conservative press in Italy has pro-
duced a steady outpouring of the Sterling-Jonathan Institute line that the
Soviet Union is the base of all terrorism. The western media have not
commented on the fact that Lagorio's statement about a declaration of
war was based on a belated confession by a long-imprisoned murderer,
and that this assertion of guilt was made before any court had reached
such a conclusion. Coming from a high official of the government, the
statement shows both the high political stakes involved and the dubious-
ness of the Italian political scene for a fair investigation and trial.

Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi has been either unable or unwill-
ing to carry out any extensive programs of social reform. In place of
these, he has built his political strategy on anti-Soviet rhetoric, militari-
zation within the New Cold War framework, and associated service to
the Reagan administration. 108 Craxi therefore had a large vested interest
in the initiation, pursuit, and successful outcome of the case against the
Bulgarians. The Christian Democrats, P-2, and reactionary elements in
the police and security forces had a parallel interest. Thus the political
elements with a stake in bringing and winning the case were formidable
and have commanded powerful business, financial, and press support in
Italy. They also received strong support from the Reagan administra-
tion, which gained enormous benefits from the Connection.

108. See Diana Johnstone, The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe's Role in America's
World (London: Verso, 1984), Chapter 4.

5. Darkness in Rome:
The Western System off
Induced Confession

w n his novel Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler imagines the way in
M which confessions were induced in the Soviet staged trials of the
1930s. Isolating the prisoner, persuading him of the hopelessness of his
position, and convincing him that he could best contribute to his own
and the national welfare by a properly directed confession yielded the
desired results. With the incarceration and isolation of Agca, the sub-
sequent pressures for cooperation, and the resultant confessions chan-
neled to mutual advantage, the West produced an analogous result in
Rome. Although the case against the Bulgarians was finally lost, the
analogy still holds for a four-year travesty of justice that produced a
huge propaganda windfall to its sponsors.'

Throughout the period immediately preceding Agca's naming of Bul-
garians, the Reagan administration and the powerful right wing of Italy
were striving to put into effect the message of the Jonathan Institute con-
ference of July 1979: Tie the Soviet Union to "international terrorism."
Agca's confessions and Martella's mindless pursuit of the case served
well both the Reagan- Jonathan Institute objectives and those of P-2 and
Bettino Craxi and his political allies in Italy.

I . The Bulgarian Sergei Antonov, although now released, was incarcerated For more
than three years. He also seems to have collapsed mentally and physically from the stress
or the accusations and confinement.

101

102

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

How Agca Was Coached

We believe that Agca was coached to implicate the Bulgarians. Coach-
ing, as we use the term here, involved three elements. One was identify-
ing for Agca the preferred villains. The second was inducing him, by of-
fering benefits and/or threatening him with damage, to name them as his
collaborators. The third ingredient was to supply Agca with the infor-
mation necessary to allow him to formulate a plausible scenario of a
conspiracy and to name specific co-conspirators. The direct and cir-
cumstantial evidence that all three of these things were done in the Bul-
garian Connection case is now compelling.

Many individuals with an interest in pinning the plot on the Bulga-
rians had access to Agca in prison, and they had an extended opportu-
nity to bribe and threaten him. We saw in the previous chapter that the
Italian secret services were dominated by P-2 members in 1981 and had
a long history of subservience to U.S. intelligence. They also had a
well-documented history of planting fabricated evidence on the Left.
Both SISMI and the Interior Ministry were spreading concocted tales of
Soviet and Bulgarian involvement in the assassination attempt long be-
fore Agca named any Bulgarians. The intelligence services not only had
access to Agca in prison, they also had longstanding relations with the
Mafia, whose incarcerated leaders dominated the Ascoli Piceno prison
in which Agca was held.

There is also evidence that some people within the Vatican were
eager to make Agca talk. The western press accepted the Sterling-Henze
line that the Soviets sought to quell the Solidarity movement in Poland
by removing its papal support. Unmentioned was the possible papal
motivation for getting the imprisoned Agca to implicate the Soviets in
order to strengthen Polish resistance to martial law and to weaken Soviet
influence in Poland and elsewhere. The first book on the assassination
attempt, The Drama of May 13, was published in West Germany by a
Vatican priest, who claimed that the KGB had trained Agca in the
Soviet Union and had ordered the shooting. 2 Suleyman Yetkin, an old
Turkish comrade of Agca's from Malatya residing in West Germany,
was paid a substantial sum of money in several installments by Dr.

2. The author, Vendelin Sluganov, got this "information" from the intelligence report
forged by SISMI and released on May 19. 1981. mentioned in the previous chapter.

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

103

Hoemeyer, Secretary General of the Union of Catholic Bishops, to per-
suade Agca to say that he had been hired by the KGB. 3

Orsan Oymen, the West German correspondent of the Turkish paper
Milliyet, and its specialist in the assassination attempt, was told by
Padre Ginno, a Vatican librarian, that "Our Church took advantage of
the assault against the Pope. It suggested in a secret manner the KGB
thesis to the press, and then stepped aside." The Vatican also had an
agent within the prison: Father Mariano Santini, the Catholic chaplain in
Ascoli Piceno. Santini had regular access to Agca in prison, and Padre
Ginno suggested to Oymen that Santini was a key figure in getting Agca
to talk. Giovanni Pandico, the chief state witness in the trial of the
Mafia in Naples, also gives Santini a prominent place in his account of
how Agca was induced to talk. Cardinal Silvio Oddi acknowledged to
Oymen that Agca wrote a letter on September 24, 1982 — just weeks be-
fore he named the Bulgarians, and immediately after the publication of
Sterling's Reader's Digest article — in which he complained to Vatican
authorities that the prison chaplain was putting pressure on him and that
he feared for his life." In short, not only did P-2 and the Italian secret
services have a political interest in getting Agca to talk and have direct
access to him, so did agents of the Vatican, who were actively using
their influence in this direction from the time of the shooting.

Agca's motives are equally clear. There is solid evidence that he was
induced to talk by the classic method of carrot and stick. After his first
trial, he was taken to Ascoli Piceno prison, where he was supposed to be
kept in solitary confinement for a full year. Isolated and harassed in var-
ious ways by prison officials, Agca complained about these pressures,
both physical and psychological, to his family and to prison authorities.
Following a softening up period, but long before the expiration of his
term of solitary confinement, he was provided with a comfortable cell
with TV, radio, and private bath. On December 29, 1981, officials of
Italian intelligence visited him. Shortly thereafter Agca was visited for

3. This plan was eventually callad of f in March 1 982. shortly af ter the meeting which,
according to Giovanni Pandico, took place between Musumeci and Agca in February or
early March 1982, as described in the text. Orsan Oymen, who reported these arrange-
ments between Hoemeyer and Yetkin, was shown a letter of March 1982 calling off the
visit to the prison. See Orsan Oymen, "Behind the Scenes of the 'Agca Investigation,'
Milliyet, November 1984.

4. Ibid During the trial. Judge Santiapichi commented to Santini that Agca seemed to
use an "ecclesiastically tinged" version of Italian. Santini denied having given Agca in-
structions in the Italian language, but in his final defense statement on March 8, 1966, An-
tonov's counsel Giuseppi Consolo claimed that Santini visited Agca more than 90 times

104

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the first time by Investigating Magistrate Ilario Martella. On February
2, 1982, Agca told his lawyer that he had been offered a deal by the in-
telligence services for talking — a reduction of his prison sentence to ten
years or less.' It was also reported in the Italian press that Agca was
threatened with a loss of his privileges and with being released into the
general Italian prison population if he failed to cooperate. The implica-
tion was that this might result in assassination for the assailant of the
Pope. 6 Martella himself acknowledged in his final Report that he had
held out to Agca the possibility of having his sentence commuted by
presidential pardon if he cooperated with the investigation.' Thus a
period of using the stick, and a continuing threat of further applications
of the stick, were combined with positive inducements to talk.

There is some dispute over the number and significance of intelli-
gence services visits to Agca in prison. Judge Martella and Prosecutor
Albano both claimed only a single visit in which nothing of great inter-
est occurred. On the other hand, an Italian police report in August 1982
stated that the secret services conducted "interviews" (plural) with
Agca for the purpose of trying to determine whether or not there were
"international connections" (i.e., a Bulgarian Connection) underlying
the plot. The Italian press also reported multiple visits by the secret ser-
vices to Ascoli Piceno prison and to Agca in particular. The interview of
December 29, 1981 , lasted five hours, according to one of the officers
involved. The Albano and Martella Reports stress that Agca said little
that was useful on December 29, 1981 , and that Agca could hardly have
been coached by officials who knew so little themselves. This misses
the complexity of coaching, which is not limited to the supply of details.
At the meeting of December 29, Agca was almost surely shown who the
secret services wanted to cast in the role of villains and what he would
have to do to get back into the limelight and improve his personal condi-
tion as a prisoner. These are important elements of coaching.

The actual decision to "confess" and the more detailed mechanics of
making a proper confession undoubtedly came later. According to the

5. Diana Johnstone. "Latest scandal leads to Reagan administration," In These Times,
December 5-11, 1984.

6 The secret services "visited Agca and warned him that once his solitary confinement
was over, 'the authorities could no longer guarantee his safety Days before he was due to
be moved to the main wing of the prison Agca began to reveal the 'Bulgarian Connec-
tion.' " Tana de Zuluela and Peter Godwin, "Face To Face With The Colonel Accused
Of Plotting To Kill the Pope," Sunday Times (London), May 26, 1983, p. 50

7 Martella Report, pp 464-65(67.2-23)

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

105

statement of Giovanni Pandico, Agca was finally induced to talk by
Raeffele Cutolo, the Naples Mafia chief, who was an inmate of Ascoli
Piceno prison at the same time as Agca. Cutolo had been persuaded to
do this by General Giuseppi Musumeci, a P-2 member and formerly
second in command of SISMI." In Pandico's account, Musumeci,
Cutolo, a prison chaplain, and a prison official explained to Agca that
he could expect trouble in prison if he failed to cooperate. It was also
suggested to him that it might be possible to arrange for getting him out
in six or seven years, if he did what was required of him. It was at this
point, also, according to Pandico, that Agca was given detailed instruc-
tions on the lines of a preliminary confession.'

As a rightwinger and anticommunist it should not have been too diffi-
cult to persuade Agca that by implicating the Bulgarians he was contrib-
uting to a useful crusade against a common enemy. Many Agca obser-
vers have noted that Agca will tell his interrogators what they want to
hear, as long as this is not damaging to his own interests. Agca will, in
fact, tell his interrogators more than they want to hear because of his
longstanding propensity to spin out mythical tales in which he is the
hero. Orsan Oymen noted that "During my previous conversations with
friends of Agca I had noticed some things which suggested signs of
Agca's being obsessed with a mania for concocting stories. For in-
stance, when Suleyman from Malatya told me about Mehmet Ali's
years at high school, he claimed that his schoolmate had a liking for ad-

8. Pandico's claims have been denied by Cutolo, Musumeci, Pazienza, and others.
Pandico's statement has not been corroborated, but the denials, by people in serious
trouble on whom the Italian state has leverage, are of dubious credibility There is no evi-
dent reason why Pandico would create a false scenario for this set of events, and his
claims are plausible. Pazienza has suggested that Pandico's story was part of a plot by
other elements of SISMI to shift the blame for the second conspiracy to him. According to
Pazienza, it was these other elements in SISMI who coached Agca (see below)
Pazienza's accusations are quite detailed and are possibly true, although he has lied on
many matters and lacks credibility. Furthermore, Pandico's naming of Musumeci and
Pazienza occurred only a week after his mother was injured in an attack presumably by the
Mafia, and would seem to be aimed at damaging the Maf ia, not as part of a SISMI-Mafia
plot to cover themselves at the expense of Pazienza. Surprisingly, Pandico's claims were
given indirect support by Claire Sterling, who asserted that she was told by an Italian
judge that Cutolo had tried to ' 'scare Agca to death" in order to ingratiate himself with the
Italian prison authorities Claire Sterling, "Silenzio so spara," Panorama, April 23,
1984

9. Pietro Calderoni, "Cell With Services," L Espresso. June 23, 1985; Bruno Rubino,
"Pazienza? The Bulgarian Trail Is His Idea," L'Epoca, July 1 , 1985 Both of these arti-
cles are interviews with Pandico.

106

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

venture and spy novels, invented all sorts of scenarios, and believed
them himself." 10

Agca would also be amenable to fingering the Bulgarians because this
provided him with another opportunity to make a mark on the world.
Self-aggrandizement and public recognition — what Mumcu and others
call his "Carlos complex" — are apparently among Agca's driving emo-
tional needs. Agca was referred to half -affectionately by some of his
Gray Wolves colleagues as the "Emperor." The Emperor likes to be in
the limelight, and enjoyed the notoriety of shooting the Pope. In fact,
this appears to have been one of the motivating forces for the assassina-
tion attempt itself. Moving once again to center stage by his confession
implicating the Bulgarians and KGB, Agca was pleased with the re-
newed attention and was eager to provide his new collaborators with
what they wanted. Playing his new role, he repeated in rote fashion, and
like a bad actor, all the formulas of the Sterling school of "international
terrorism."

In our view of what actually transpired in Italy, Agca would not have
required much direct coaching. Having been shown his options, and the
usefulness and personal advantage of cooperation, he would understand
that his captors were deeply interested in proving a Bulgarian involve-
ment in the assassination attempt. This had already been made clear in
the interviews of the secret services and in the drift of Martella's interro-
gations. By September 1982 Sterling's Reader's Digest article and the
NBC-TV spectacular on the Plot had made their mark, and the Sterling
model of a Bulgarian Connection had surely reached Agca through the
media as well as via interrogations. Here was a ready-made opportunity
to move back to center stage!

Pandico claimed that Musumeci came to Ascoli Piceno with a set of
note cards on which were written the motivations that Agca was sup-
posed to offer as the basis for his confession, as well as the details on
what he was to say about Bulgarian and Soviet involvement. A year and
a half before Pandico 's statement, another Mafia member turned in-
former, Giuseppi Cilleri, had already been cited in the Italian press as
claiming that Francesco Pazienza had been a "frequent visitor" to As-
coli Piceno prison and that he had personally given Agca instructions in
preparation for the photo identification of Bulgarians." Whether by
such means, or by judiciously informative questioning combined with

10. Oymen, op. cit., n. 3.

1 1 . Calderoni, op. cit., n. 9. The account of Cilleri's testimony was given in an article
on Agca in L' Espresso, December 25, 1983.

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

107

access to the Sterling-Kalb version of the Plot, Agca was provided with
enough detail to make a plausible first approximation case. He was
eventually shown pictures of individuals and apartments, with identifi-
cation sufficient to allow him to provide "surprising details."" Then,
with generous access to journalistic accounts of the case and related is-
sues," and by the intelligent use of further questions by the secret ser-
vices and magistrates," 1 Agca could provide new claims and more "sur-
prising details" without requiring explicit coaching.

A curiosity in the case, which strongly supports the coaching
hypothesis, is the long time that it took for Agca to name the Bulga-
rians. Arrested in May 1981, Agca did not begin to name his Bulgarian
accomplices until October and November of 1982, a lapse of 17 to 18
months. This was the period of opportunity, during which the coinci-
dence of interest between Agca and his captors could be made to yield a
congenial confession. Agca failed to provide a single Bulgarian name
until some six months after he had agreed to cooperate with the Italian
authorities, which was in April 1982. Neither Sterling nor Marlella has
provided a satisfactory explanation for Agca's long delay in implicating
the Bulgarians.' 5 Our conclusion is that he did not confess earlier about
Bulgarian participation because he had nothing to confess. He had to be
softened up in prison and then induced to say the right things.
To recapitulate the reasons for believing that Agca was coached:
• A large array of political factions in Italy, extending from P-2
through the Craxi socialists, and including important people within the
Vatican, had a strong political stake in getting Agca to implicate the
Bulgarians and Soviet Union.

12. We discuss below the evidence that the photo identification parade was pre-ar-
ranged.

13. ' 'Every single fact that Agca describes about the workings of the Turkish Mafia and
its links with Bulgaria was contained in a series of newspaper articles which Agca read in
jail." De Zulueta and Godwin, op. cil , n. 6, p. 50.

14. "When asked by Martella in Bulgaria whether he had any salient physical features,
Vassilev said that he had a mole on his left cheek. In a subsequent confession, as Vassilev
points out, 'Agca described my mole in the very same words which I used in describing it
here.' " Ibid., pp. 48, 50. In his final defense summary on March 7, 1986, Antonov's at-
torney Consolo pointed out that Agca originally described Aivazov as speaking Italian
"quite well." The proprietor of the boarding house in Rome where Agca stayed sub-
sequently testified that the individual who reserved a room for Agca, alleged by Agca to
have been Aivazov, spoke "perfect" Italian. Shortly thereafter Agca changed his ac-
count: Aivazov spoke "perfect" Italian. Agca was supposedly not privy to the secret tes-
timony of the boarding house proprietor. This pattern occurred with great frequency.

15. We discuss Sterling's attempts at an explanation in Chapters 2 and 6.

108

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

• The Reagan administration was also anxious to demonstrate the
depth of Soviet evil in the early 1980s, and its propaganda instruments
were in the forefront in pressing each and every propaganda opportu-
nity. Agca's visit to Sofia provided such an opportunity to Sterling,
Henze, and company. The power of the U.S. media, and the links of the
U.S. government, intelligence agencies, and business community to
their counterparts in Italy are capable of affecting Italian political
choices.

• Agca was perfectly positioned to be manipulated. He was in prison
for life and easily subjected to inducements and threats by his captors.

• Agca was also readily manipulable by virtue of his personal charac-
teristics and politics. He liked to make up stories and to be at the center
of attention. He also had durable ties to the anticommunist extreme
Right of Turkey.

• The possibilities of manipulating Agca were recognized by all par-
ties from the start, and both SISMI and the Vatican "jumped the
gun' ' — the former fabricated a Soviet plot within a week of the assassi-
nation attempt, while Vatican interests proposed that Agca be induced
to talk long before he had claimed any Bulgarian involvement.

• All of the Italian intelligence services were headed by P-2 members
and were broadly infiltrated by P-2 at the time of the assassination at-
tempt. This provided the opportunity to disseminate disinformation on
Bulgarian-KGB involvement and then coach Agca to claim the reality of
the disinformation scenario. In early 1981 Francesco Pazienza was a
SISMI agent, and he and Michael Ledeen had been in an alliance of
convenience to serve Reagan in the Billygate affair. Italy has a
longstanding rightwing and intelligence tradition of planting fabricated
evidence on the Left.

• Despite his "solitary confinement," Agca had numerous visitors,
many without the knowledge or approval of Investigating Magistrate
Martella. As noted earlier, officials of the Italian intelligence services
visited Agca on December 29, 1981, already probing into "interna-
tional connections' ' and almost surely telling Agca who the security ser-
vices were interested in implicating in the Plot and the advantages that
would accrue to him by "cooperating." The Italian press has claimed
that Agca was also visited by other SISMI officials, including Lieuten-
ant Colonel Giuseppi Belmonte and Francesco Pazienza. 16 Agca himself
told the court in June 1985 that he had been visited by Pazienza. We

16. Johnstone, op cil , n. 5.

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

109

also know that he was visited by U.S. and Turkish intelligence officials,
by a Turkish journalist, and by others. His prison conditions were
ludicrously porous Tor a condemned criminal who the Investigating
Magistrate was relying upon for new information.

• Agca was in a prison cell next to that of Dr. Giovanni Senzani, a
"penitent" member of the Red Brigades, who stood to benefit by
cooperating with SISMI and the prison authorities. Senzani was in regu-
lar contact with Agca and supposedly taught him Italian.

• Agca was also frequently attended to by Father Mariano Santini, a
Catholic prison chaplain who was later jailed for serving as a prison
emissary of the Mafia. Why would Agca, a non-Catholic, require the
aid of a Catholic chaplain? As we noted earlier, a Vatican official de-
scribed Santini as a Vatican instrument in inducing Agca to talk, and
Agca himself complained to the Vatican and elsewhere of pressure from
Santini.

• Former mafioso Pandico has described in detail the pressures ap-
plied to Agca by Pandico's former boss Cutolo. Cutolo, an inmate in the
Ascoli Piceno prison at the same time as Agca, was in a position to
threaten him. Pazienza has denied his or Musumeci's involvement,
claiming that other elements in SISMI, also linked to Michael Ledeen,
actually did coach Agca, but have tried to shift the blame on to him.
Pazienza named names and provided many details, although he is not
noted for reliability. But as Diana Johnstone points out: "With
Pazienza's denials and counter-accusations, the controversy is boiling
down to a question of who within SISMI invented the Bulgarian Con-
nection and whether they were prompted by American colleagues." 17

• Following his period of isolation and harassment, but while still
theoretically in solitary confinement, Agca had a TV set and radio, and
received newspapers and private communications from outside the
prison. According to Prosecutor Albano's Report, when in June 1983
Agca withdrew his assertion that he had visited Antonov's apartment
and met his wife and daughter, he stated that he had obtained his de-
scription of Antonov's apartment — its layout, furnishings, etc. — from
newspapers." The prosecutor also conceded that Agca's feat in produc-

17 Diana Johnstone, "Bulgarian Connection: Finger-pointing in the pontiff plot
labyrinth," In These Times, January 29-February 4, 1986

18. Agca got useful materials for his confessions from Turkish books and magazine ar-
ticles, as well as radio, TV. newspapers, and coaches The role of Celenk in Agca's plot
scenario escalated sharply after he read a book by Mumcu on arms smuggling in which
Celenk was a key figure. See note 36 in Chapter 2. See also note 13 above

110

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ing the telephone numbers of various Bulgarians had been accomplished
by his looking them up in a telephone book "inadvertently" provided to
him. Agca repeated these declarations during the trial, telling the court
that he had found the details of his "confessions" in the newspapers.

While these admissions demonstrate the breakdown of controls over
Agca's sources of information bearing on the case, they do not prove
coaching. The Bulgarians, and Antonov's defense counsel, claim, how-
ever, that a thoroughgoing search of press coverage shows that at the
time he provided the details on Antonov's apartment, no Italian or Tur-
kish newspaper had yet produced a single word about Antonov's flat in
Rome. This defense claim is in accord with common sense. Why would
any paper have provided details of Antonov's apartment before Agca's
claims made those details an issue? Such descriptions only followed his
confession and the first investigative visit to Antonov's flat on June 1 1,
1983."

• Former Minister of Defense Lagorio stated before the Italian Parlia-
ment that Agca identified his Bulgarian accomplices in September 1982
from a photo album that had been prepared by the secret services. Al-
bano's Report placed the photo identification on November 8, 1982,
and Martella also stated that on November 8 Agca picked out the Bulga-
rians "without being informed in any way of the names or positions of
the people involved.'" 0 The contradiction between Lagorio and Albano-
Martella has never been explained, but lends credence to the supposition
that Agca was shown the photo album before November 8.

There are several other features of the photo album display which
suggest bias, coaching, or both. One is that the album contained exclu-
sively pictures of Bulgarians — 56 in all — which means that if Agca had
picked three persons at random he would still have named three Bulga-
rians. Second, prior to his initial photo identification session Agca had
"confessed" to knowing only two Bulgarian officials, "Kolev" and
"Bayramic." He identified these two as being photos number one and
number two in the album, an amazing coincidence. (The odds against
any two of 56 photos occupying places number one and two in the
album by chance are 1,540 to one). Another noteworthy feature of the
photo identification is that at his second session he picked out as "Pet-
rov" the only person in the album dressed in military uniform. 1 ' It

19. Boyan Traikov, Mystification. Dr. Martella! (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1984), p. 28.

20. Quoted in Michael Dobbs, "A Communist Plot to Kill the Pope — Ora Liar"s Fan-
tasy," Washington Post, November 18, 1984.

21 . Although Petrov was allegedly his "control," his existence had previously slipped

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

111

would appear that the security services were trying to make it easier for
Agca to select the right people ("Remember, the one with a military
uniform, and the first two in the album"!). Finally, the photo album
shown to Agca had been used earlier in a trial involving Senzani, the
Red Brigades prisoner who was in the next cell to Agca and in frequent
communication with him. Senzani would have been well situated to
brief Agca on the Bulgarian details that he needed to know in the iden-
tification parade.

• Antonov was allegedly introduced to Agca as "Bayramic."
Bayramic is the name of a small town in Turkey located near Agca's
home in Malatya. (This was disclosed by Antonov's defense counsel in
his concluding remarks on March 6, 1986.) This would be another ex-
traordinary coincidence if we were to take Agca's word that this was a
code name fixed by the Bulgarians; on the other hand, it is entirely com-
prehensible if we assume that the name was another concoction by
Agca.

• According to Agca, "Bayramic" was the only name by which he
knew Antonov. But he allegedly communicated with Antonov by call-
ing him at the Bulgarian Embassy, through the general switchboard.
Martella never addressed the question of how Antonov could be reached
through the switchboard operator, who presumably did not know An-
tonov's highly secret code name, by Agca, who knew Antonov only by
the code name.

• Initially Agca identified Antonov as having a beard. While An-
tonov had a beard at the time of his arrest, his counsel was able to prove
that he did not have a beard at a time when Agca claims they met. Agca
identified Antonov on the basis of a later photograph, making the kind
of mistake in timing that occurs with coaching, when the beard appear-
ing later is carelessly assumed to have been worn earlier. How did Agca
even recognize the bearded Antonov whom he had never seen in the
bearded state? On the supposition that he might still have recognized
him, would he not be likely to note his former nonbearded state? Agca
subsequently suggested that Antonov probably wore a false beard. And
the beard apparently changed color at each meeting, as in a bad spy
thriller. 22

• In his detailed description of Antonov's apartment, Agca men-
tioned a folding door that divided the apartment. But while such a door

Agca's memory.

22. For the actual sequence of Agca's changing claims about Antonov's beard, see the
text below on pp. 1 16-17.

112

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

existed in the other apartments in the building, the folding door had
been removed in Antonov's apartment and replaced by a curtain prior to
Agca's alleged visit. Again, as in the case of Antonov's beard, we have
the kind of mistake easily made by imperfect coaching, where the ar-
rangements in Antonov's apartment are inferred from those in other
apartments in the same building. 23

• After Agca retracted his claim that he had been on reconnaissance
missions planning to murder Walesa, he was asked to explain how he
knew so much about Walesa's hotel if he had never been there? Accord-
ing to Michael Dobbs, "Agca claimed that he learned the details from
magistrates who had interrogated him in connection with a parallel in-
vestigation into an alleged Bulgarian spy ring in Italy." 24 This admis-
sion once again displays a broken-down judicial process. But there are
two further problems. First, at the time that Agca was interrogated by
these magistrates, they themselves had not received the information
which they supposedly passed on inadvertently to Agca. Second, the in-
terrogations of Luigi Scricciolo, which he named as the source of his in-
formation, do not contain any descriptions of the building in question. 2 '
Agca also named a Bulgarian diplomat, Ivan Dontchev, as a partner in
the Walesa murder plot, and he identified Dontchev from a photo
album. Subsequently Agca admitted that he had never seen Dontchev in
his life. How did he identify Dontchev's picture without coaching? 26

Martella, Priore, and Italy's Investigation of the Plot

Just as the U.S. press has never seen fit to examine the Italian political
environment, so also it has never analyzed closely Magistrate Ilario
Martella and his handling of the Bulgarian Connection. Martella was
often given laudatory and entirely uncritical accolades emphasizing his

23. Also living in the same apartment building in 1 98 1 was Reverend Felix A . Mor lion,
a veteran reactionary and CIA asset. Perhaps the folding door idea was obtained from
Morlion See "The Role of Felix Morlion," CoverlAclion Information Bulletin, Number
25, Winter 1986, p. 30; // Mondo, April 8, 1985; and L Espresso, May 19, 1985.

24. Michael Dobbs, "Agca's Changing Testimony," Washington Post, October 17,
1984.

25. Martella Report, pp. 375-82 (490-500), 423-27 (557-63).

26. Coaching would include a disclosure by a magistrate during interrogation which the
witness seizes upon and is allowed to use as confirmation of his special knowledge of the
matter disclosed to him! See note 14 above on Age*** identification of Vassilev's mole.

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

113

determination, conscientiousness, and integrity; but his background and
performance were never considered in any depth or with the slightest
critical perspective. This allowed the press to proceed on the assumption
that we were witnessing in Italy a thorough and unbiased judicial inves-
tigation, and it permitted the steady stream of fresh allegations and leaks
to be given full propaganda value.

With an unbiased media, by contrast, we believe that the fraudulent
character of the pre-trial proceeding would have been quickly made evi-
dent." The preceding chapter described a political environment that
seriously threatened the integrity of judicial processes, and in fact the
antiterrorism law under which the case was brought suspends many of
the traditional rules that distinguish democratic from nondemocratic
societies. The passionate public statements by political leaders in Italy
and the United States that clearly prejudged the case, the enormous
media barrage that did the same, and the huge stake of Italian and U.S.
conservatives in the outcome made this a political and politicized case
from the very beginning. Would this not affect the judicial system, the
choice of investigators and judges in Italy, and their ability and willing-
ness to look for the truth? The question did not arise in the West.

The P-2 conspiracy penetrated the Italian judiciary. The 1984 Par-
liamentary Report, for example, states that Dr. Carmelo Spagnulo,
chief prosecutor of the Rome Court of Appeals, attended a key meeting
held in Gelli's home in 1973. In the Report's general enumeration of
P-2 penetration into public administration, which counted 422 P-2-
linked officials, 16 active and 3 retired magistrates were included.
Whatever the affiliations of particular judges such as Martella, this is
symptomatic of an unhealthy judicial environment.

By the late 1970s the Italian judiciary was saturated with the Sterling-
Jonathan Institute perspective on terrorism. This framework was im-
mediately applied to the plot against the Pope. Thus Martella's col-
league Rosario Priore, Judge of the Court of Appeal and serving as In-
vestigating Judge at the Rome Tribunal, produced a report entitled "The
cases Moro, Dozier and the attack on the Pope," which is vintage Ster-
ling. 28 After describing Agca's account of his stay in Sofia and present-
ing a number of alleged facts about the Bulgarians named by Agca, 2 *

27. We are speaking of the initiation and investigative phase of the case, not the trial,
whose conduct was fair, although subject to political constraints.

28. This document was circulated in the United States by the Italian Embassy.

29. Two of them were in Bulgaria at the same lime as Agca, and two "were in service
in Rome at the same time the structure discussed above was in operation — acquiring infor-

114

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Priore says that this "network" shows "the interweaving of a number
of international interests and the existence of centers that manipulate ter-
rorism, which are located in other countries and in their intelligence ser-
vices. . . Priore quotes without qualification Agca's description of
his own role: "I am an international terrorist, ready to help the terrorists
of any nation." 3 ' Priore asserts that the manipulators of international
terrorism "aim at destabilizing the western democracies," 33 although he
does not point to any evidence that would support this claim. This is of
course a major theme of Claire Sterling's The Terror Network, which
she could not sell to western intelligence agencies, but which found a
happy home in the Italian judicial system. 13 Priore infers a "network"
from an alleged Bulgarian Connection alone, and "international cen-
ters" of terrorism (plural) from the same evidence. He shows not the
slightest skepticism concerning Agca's testimony, despite its continu-
ally shifting character and other deficiencies. He refers to Agca's state-
ment — "I am an international terrorist" etc. — as "highly significant,"
not as a statement that would be significant if true. The extremely rote
quality of Agca's remarks on international terrorism, which conform so
precisely to — even caricature — the Sterling model of a modem terrorist,
does not elicit doubts from this Italian judge, and coaching is not enter-
tained as a possibility. The hypothesis that the Bulgarians and Soviets
might have been set up by some other "centers of terrorism" (if any
exist for Priore) is never addressed.

Judge Ilario Martella apparently shares Priore's frame of reference.
He was put in charge of the case in November 1981. Like Priore, Mar-
tella started out with a prior assumption that the charges which he was
supposed to be investigating were essentially true. The most remarkable

mation on (he Italian trade unions. ..." Rosario Priore, "The cases Moro, Dozier and
the attack on the Pope," p. 24.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., p. 25.

32. Ibid., p. 26.

33. The judge in charge of the second trial in Rome, Severino Santiapichi, who also
presided over Agca's initial trial for the attempted assassination of the Pope, stated at the
conclusion of the earlier trial that Agca was merely the surface representation of a "deep
conspiracy . . . orchestrated by secret forces, carefully planned and directed down to the
smallest detail." This reference to "secret forces" has a Sterling-like ring, and as we dis-
cuss elsewhere in this book, the planning of the assassination attempt was remarkably
mismanaged. In the second (rial, just concluded, Santiapichi showed that he was not corn-
mined to the a priori "deep conspiracy" view, and the course of the trial as conducted by
Santiapichi effectively undermined the "first conspiracy" scenarios of western disinfor-
mationists and their "secret forces."

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

I IS

illustration of this was his reaction to Agca's numerous lies and retrac-
tions. In a normal judicial process, lies and retractions that destroy pari
of the claims of a witness weaken the credibility of those parts that can-
not be positively disproved. Disbelief is directly related to the number
of lies and retractions. This was not true in the Martella investigation.
Martella postulated that, having decided to tell the truth, Agca was al-
ways struggling to make that core truth more credible. He lied, accord-
ing to Martella, in order to "give more credibility to his statement." 14
That the statement to which Agca desired to give credibility was not also
a lie was, of course, merely Martella's gratuitous assumption, for which
he gave no rationale. This assumption flies in the face of normal reason-
ing — which does not rationalize selected lies by a priori assumptions
about the liar's intent. Martella's investigation was therefore hopelessly
biased at the outset.

When Agca retracted evidence, for Martella this was to Agca's cred-
it, as he was cleansing himself of excesses in his search for the truth.
("We cannot ignore the particular importance in the search for truth of
the 'retraction' made by the same Agca during the course of judicial in-
quiry."") An alternative explanation, which Martella never addressed,
is that Agca shifted his testimony in order to make a new dramatic entry
on to the stage. This would, of course, require that he say that which the
audience (i.e., Martella and his associates) wanted most to hear.
Another possibility which Martella never mentioned is that Agca re-
tracted claims because his lies had run into so many contradictions that
they were no longer sustainable. Thus, Agca ultimately withdrew his
claim that Aivazov was the man photographed from behind fleeing the
Square on May 13, claiming instead that it was his friend Oral Celik.
The reason for this recantation, according to Agca, was that he had de-
termined "to tell the truth to the end even at the risk of harming a friend
who like Celik is dearer to me than a brother but in the knowledge that I
am telling the absolute truth." 3 " Martella quoted this with admiration,
although it was an assertion of a man who had lied incessantly up to that
very moment." Martella made no reference to the fact that Agca's re-
traction followed shortly after a press conference in Sofia, at which the
opportunity to see Aivazov had made it clearly evident to the assembled

34. Martella Report, p. 377(492-93).

35. Ibid., p. 769(986).

36. Ibid., p. 127(172).

37. The trial has cast doubts on the truth of Agca's identification of Celik in the Square.
It appears that Martella was gulled twice about the identification of the one photograph.

116

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

press that he bore no resemblance to the man in the Lowell Newton
photograph, and thus it could not have been he in the Square. When the
counsel f or the defense suggested that this, rather than a sudden burst of
sincerity, might have had something to do with Agca's recantation,
Martella refused to accept such a cynical view!

Because for Martella Agca was a truth-seeker, he could adjust his evi-
dence by a system of successive approximations. In fact, the great judi-
cial innovation brought to the Bulgarian Connection case by Martella
was allowing the witness supporting the a priori Free World truth about
the assassination attempt to adjust his testimony by a trial-and-error pro-
cess with no penalty for error. As Michael Dobbs pointed out, "The
overall effect of these changes was to bring his evidence into line with
events occurring outside the top-security prison where he was being
held as well as with revelations about the case in the mass media. ' ,M Al-
though he made errors on key points and radically contradicted himself
time and again, this never fatally damaged Agca's credibility for Mar-
tella.

Agca's identification of Antonov and his claim to have done business
with him were strategic points in the case. Consider, then, how Agca
identified Antonov: 39

(1) It took him six months after agreeing to cooperate with the Italian
authorities even to mention Antonov 's existence.

(2) In his first reference to Antonov, made at the end of October
1982, Agca was brief. He said only that on May 12, 1981, his Bulgarian
"control officer" pointed out Antonov to him as the man who would
drive him on the next day to the assassination rendezvous. Agca said
that Antonov had a blondish beard.

(3) On November 8, 1982, Antonov was recognized by Agca in the
photo album. He now had a black beard. Agca now remembered that he
had seen Antonov on two or three previous occasions (whereas 10 days
earlier he stated that he had seen Antonov only on May 1 2 and that he
had had a blond beard).

(4) On November 19, 11 days after being shown the photo, Agca's
recollections bloomed and finer details were forthcoming. He now re-
membered that Antonov had a broad forehead and a big nose, and that

38. Dobbs, op. cit., n.24.

39. The facts in this account are taken from the chronology given by Michael Dobbs in
his "A Communist Plot to Kill the Pope — Or a Liar's Fantasy," Washington Post,
November 18, 1984 This article summarizes Martella's interrogation of Agca on pages
84-87 (103-7) of his Report.

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

117

he had been introduced to Agca not by his control officer but at the
Hotel Archimede back in December 1980. At that time they discussed
plans to assassinate Lech Walesa!

(5) On November 27, 1982, Agca now claimed to have first met An-
tonov in the apartment of his control officer at 36 Via Galiani.

(6) By late December, Agca had moved on to a version of greater
complexity and intimacy. He now claimed that he had met Antonov and
his wife in their own apartment several days before the assassination at-
tempt — a version Agca retracted on June 28, 1983.

Agca also adjusted his story several times concerning the events of
the day of the assassination attempt. It turned out that so many people
had seen Antonov at the Balkan Air office on May 13, 1981 at 5 P.M. —
the time when Agca claimed that Antonov was with him — that Agca's
evidence was not sustainable. Well, Agca could then recall that he had
in fact met Antonov somewhat earlier. This was perfectly understanda-
ble to Martella.

Agca's method was to adjust his claims until they fit times for which
the Bulgarians had no ironclad alibis. His ability to get away with this
depended on the fact that Martella disbelieved Bulgarians as strongly as
he believed Agca (and anybody who supported his claims). For Mar-
tella, Bulgarians were not seekers after the truth. Their failures to re-
member all of the details of the events during a day two years earlier
quickly aroused his suspicions. Numerous Bulgarian and Italian wit-
nesses brought forward by the defense were dismissed for lack of preci-
sion and for contradictions in their recollections. But when Agca was
caught unable to state on what floor Aivazov's apartment was located
(he allegedly visited it a number of times), Martella says "it would have
been much more surprising had Agca been not mistaken." 40

The Martella process was completed by his further dichotomous treat-
ment of possible coaching. Martella was extremely alert to the possibil-
ity that the Bulgarians might connive among themselves to create an
alibi, and he was quick to dismiss new claims that corrected earlier in-
consistencies. These he saw to be clearly based on collusion. But re-
garding the possibility that Agca was primed from the beginning, or step
by step, one can observe a completely different Martella — more under-

40. Traikov, op cil., n 19, p. 38 When Agca tried to locate Aivazov's apartment, he
got badly confused. He also misspelled the street name, using two 'Is' in Galiani, a mis-
take made in the telephone directory, but not on the street sign on the block. None of these
errors impressed Martella

118

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

standing of Agca's problems in searching for the truth, and remarkably
naive and vague about the possibilities of connivance and collusion.

Here again was a double standard that protected a case which so well
served western political interests. What makes Martella's naivetd about
the possibility that Agca was coached especially ludicrous was that he
maintained no control over the imprisoned Agca's visitors or activities,
whether by lack of power or because he delegated it to the intelligence
services and prison authorities. Martella was vague about this lack of
control and its implications, but denied his own responsibility. Martella
himself visited Agca only after a long delay, and shortly after the visit
by the intelligence services. This suggests the possibility of a "two
track" system, by which the intelligence services and prison authorities
arranged for Agca to be primed, and Martella then accepted the new in-
sights and sought to confirm them independently. This division of labor
would allow SISMI and others to do the dirty work of getting Agca to
see the light and feeding him the requisite information, while Martella
would be left as an innocent if perhaps naive judge playing dumb about
the SISMI preparations as he doggedly searched for the truth.

In the summary of his final Report Martella spoke of the plot as "a
real act of war. " This language was close to that demagogically used by
Defense Minister Lagorio on the floor of the Italian Parliament, but it is
an especially flamboyant and politically loaded phrase in a case resting
strictly on Agca's claims and still untested in a jury trial. After noting
that Agca had been provided with a perfectly forged passport and that he
had received financial support and protection during his travels up to
May 13, Martella concluded that "Ali Agca was only a pawn in a vast
plot. ..." The facts cited by Martella, however, were perfectly com-
patible with a "tiny plot" involving the Malatya branch of the Gray
Wolves. The "vast" plot is political rhetoric not grounded in evidence.

Martella's political bias was also reflected in his affinity for U.S. dis-
informationists. Just prior to arresting Antonov, Martella visited the
United States, where he was given a special viewing of the NBC-TV
program "The Man Who Shot The Pope," and consulted with various
government officials and experts on the case. One of his informants was
Amaud de Borchgrave, a Red Scare novelist and major disinformation
source. From de Borchgrave Martella got the information that the head
of the French secret services had learned about an "Eastern" plot
against the Pope in advance, and had actually warned the Vatican. 41

41. The ultimate source of this information is unclear The head of the French intelli-

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

119

This point eventually showed up in Agca's testimony. Agca claimed
that the Bulgarians urged speed in executing the plot, as the French and
Rumanian secret services were aware of it and the papal authorities
might take countermeasures. Martella cited these claims in his Report's
summary, apparently taking them seriously. He never seems to have
noted the contradiction between the claim that the alleged conspirators
feared prior knowledge of the plot by the authorities, and the incredibly
loose behavior of the Bulgarians in entertaining Agca and openly parad-
ing around with him for several days preceding the assassination at-
tempt. We feel confident that this de Borchgravian information offered
by Agca was fed to him by one of his interrogators, to be regurgitated
for the delectation of the investigating magistrate.

Claire Sterling also appears to have had a close relationship with Mar-
tella. She states in The Time of the Assassins that she ' 'dropped in on
Martella" to check up on his agenda, 42 and apparently did so more than
once, 43 although she notes elsewhere that he "was free to discuss the
case only with competent judicial authorities." 44 It would appear to be
no coincidence that the first journalist to obtain the Albano Report was
Claire Sterling. The Sterling "imprint" is evident in both the Albano
and Martella Reports in their Cold War premises and in their framing of
the Bulgarian Connection case.

Under Martella's management the case was also notable for leaks and
delays. Martella always reluctantly produced just enough copy to keep
the pot boiling. After Agca was persuaded to implicate the Bulgarians in
November 1982, Martella busily visited Antonov's apartment and
otherwise displayed to the press that energy in pursuing Agca's claims
that was one of his most distinctive attributes. On July 8, 1983, Agca
was brought out of jail to be interrogated concerning the kidnapping of
Emmanuela Orlandi, the Vatican official's daughter. The press was in-

gence agency that passed the story along to the Vatican, Comte Alexandre de Marenche.
was a good friend of Francesco Pazienza, who was at that time a member of SISMI and
collaborator with Ledeen. Pazienza claimed that he and de Marenche warned the Vatican
ot this threat six months ahead of the assassination attempt. (Jonathan Kwitny, "Tales of
Intrigue: Why an Italian Spy Got Closely Involved In the Billygate Affair," Wall Street
Journal, August 8, 1985, p. 12.) This was not the first time that de Marenche had warned
the Pope about an alleged assassination attempt. De Marenche was himself an important
disinformationist and recycler of the disinformation of other intelligence agencies.

42. Claire Sterling, TheTime of the Assassins (New York: Holt, Rinehartand Winston,
1983), p. 64.

43. Ibid., pp. 109, 194.

44. Ibid., p. 144.

120

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

formed of the occasion; and Agca was allowed to speak before Italian
TV cameras, where he presented a full litany of Sterling cliches, as a
spokesman for law and order: "I was trained in Bulgaria and Syria . . .
the Bulgarian services. . . . Yes, by the KGB." Martella disclaimed re-
sponsibility for allowing this organized press conference for Agca, but
if this is true it indicates a serious lack of control over judicial processes.
In December 1984 Agca was again allowed to be interviewed by an Ital-
ian journalist, although he was presumably scheduled for trial for con-
spiracy to murder. The leak of the Albano Report to Claire Sterling fits
the same pattern.

Martella showed no interest in any possible locus of the plot other
than Bulgaria, a point also stressed and criticized by Turkish analyst
Ugur Mumcu. 45 Agca spent a great deal of time in Switzerland and West
Germany, which are major Gray Wolves centers, and the Gray Wolves
provided Agca with money and guns throughout his travels in Europe. It
is important, too, that the details showing extensive Gray Wolves in-
volvement are independent of Agca's testimony. Although Celebi,
Agca's paymaster, lived in Frankfurt, Martella failed to go there and
seek evidence of a possible Gray Wolves conspiracy.

Martella was also extremely unenterprising in seeking evidence that
contradicted Agca's claims, and when he was confronted with it he
tended to look the other way. In Bulgaria, Martella visited the Vitosha
Hotel, where Agca claimed to have stayed and met his accomplices in
Room 911. The Vitosha keeps extensive records — the guest register,
passport data, and details on the occupants of each room. During the
period of Agca's alleged stay, neither his name nor passport aliases ap-
pear on the hotel records. According to Bulgarian authorities, Martella
didn't even bother to make a court-usable copy of these records, nor did
he show any interest in checking out and verifying the complete record
of all of the room occupants during the relevant period. 46

Another important illustration concerns Agca's claim to have met
Mrs. Antonov on several different occasions and to have visited An-
tonov, his wife, and daughter in their apartment. Even though these
claims were extremely implausible, Martella believed them and failed to
show any initiative in proving Agca wrong. The defense had to dig up
the evidence that Mrs. Antonov had driven with friends to Yugoslavia.
The defense — not the dogged investigator — got copies of hotel registers

45 Ugur Mumcu, Papa, Mqfya. Agca (Istanbul: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984), p. 27
46. Christian Roulette, La Filiere: Jean-Paul II, Antonov. Agca (Paris: Editions du Sor-
bier, 1984), pp. 245-52.

FIVE: DARKNESS IN ROME

121

and affidavits of identification at hotels and border crossings. At the
time Agca allegedly met Mrs. Antonov at the Picadilly restaurant, she
was in Sofia. The defense was obliged to seek out and produce compel-
ling data showing this. Martella never even bothered to check out Mrs.
Antonov's movements through the Rome airport. The Bulgarians claim
that when Martella finally interrogated Mrs. Antonov, his questioning
was lengthy and hostile. Subsequently, Agca admitted that he had never
met Mrs. Antonov.

Martella was clearly a "team player" — the team being the Italian
political-intelligence elite and their allies in Washington, D C. His
function was to push the Bulgarian Connection as far as it could be
pushed, to deflect criticisms as best he could, to keep the ball in the air
as long as public relations points could be extracted from it. He per-
formed this function well.

The Trial and The Coaching Hypothesis

The trial provided important support for the coaching hypothesis in two
ways. For one thing, by exposing Agca to open view and by its failure
to obtain confirmation anywhere for his claims of Bulgarian involve-
ment, the trial stripped away the last vestiges of believability of the
Sterling-Henze model. In doing this, the trial proceedings inevitably
suggested questions about the route through which Agca came to latch
on to the Bulgarians, although this line of analysis was not pursued re-
lentlessly. The court apparently felt that testing Agca's claims was the
first order of business. If they were not confirmed, the prosecution's
case was lost. The issue of how Agca came to expound false claims,
while indirectly relevant, was not regarded as worthy of a major in-
quiry. That area also happens to be especially sensitive politically.

The trial also contributed to validating the coaching hypothesis more
directly by information that cropped up during the proceedings. Some-
times this information was thrust upon the court by independent de-
velopments in Italy. Pandico's interview in L'Espresso describing a
coaching scenario in detail could hardly be ignored. During the interro-
gations of the Gray Wolves Ozbey and Catli, the court was taken aback
by Catli's contention, and Ozbey's reluctant admission, that the West
German police had offered a bribe to Celik to come to West Germany to
testify in support of Agca's claims. This evidence added plausibility to

122

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the coaching hypothesis by showing that the willingness of intelligence
services to manipulate evidence in support of the Bulgarian Connection
was not confined to Italy. As for Italy itself, during the course of the
trial another court, in Milan, issued its dramatic judgment against
Pazienza, Belmonte, and Musumeci for crimes, including the forging of
evidence. This also helped to focus attention on the question of the in-
tegrity of the Italian secret services, an issue that Albano, Martella, and
Sterling had carefully avoided.

In sum, the trial greatly strengthened the case — already formidable —
that Agca was coached while in prison, and that the Bulgarian Connec-
tion rested on a "second conspiracy."

6. The Disinf ormationists:
Sterling, Henze,
and Ledeen

As we have stressed, the Bulgarian Connection was exceedingly
functional and met urgent political and ideological needs of the
West. The Reagan administration's plan to build 17,000 new nuclear
warheads and to deploy space-based battle stations is much more salable
to the public and Congress when news headlines read: "Soviets Plot to
Kill Pope. " In Italy also the Bulgarian Connection served well the Craxi
socialists, Christian Democrats, and the neofascist P-2 in their efforts to
embarrass and isolate the Communist Party and to facilitate participa-
tion in the U.S. -sponsored New Cold War.

Given the great serviceability of a Bulgarian-Soviet Connection to
powerful western interests, it was to be expected that the mass media of
the West would quickly accept and then help extract publicity mileage
from claims of Soviet involvement. U.S. conservatives, of course, con-
tend that the media are hotbeds of dissent, the source of unceasing strug-
gle against established government and corporate interests. We will
show in this and the following chapter that the conservative model has
no relationship to reality in the Bulgarian Connection case, where mass
media coverage of the Connection was almost completely dominated by
the conservative Sterling-Henze-Ledeen axis. It is ironic that this trio
and their allies regularly assail the media, while at the same time main-
taining their own full, almost exclusive, access and essentially complete
freedom from criticism. But the conservative attacks are purposeful, de-
signed to intimidate the media into keeping out dissident voices al-
together' and moving the system toward a desired 100 percent con-

I . Given (heir position as established, brand name authorities, whose appearance will

123

124

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

formity. As Murray B. Levin points out in his Political Hysteria in
America "A near unanimity of pro-conspiratorial communications may
be a necessary precondition for the successful creation of a myth." 2

Another important factor that causes the conservatives to attack the
media is that they are themselves in the disinformation business. They
all, of course, make periodic, usually brief, genuflections to Western
Freedom, but their enthusiasm for the practice of political freedom is
less evident.' This may be why they skirt so easily around the political
crimes of rightwing states like Turkey and South Africa. Many conser-
vatives contend that we are fighting a holy war against an enemy that
has no scruple. We are at a disadvantage because of our tradition of hon-
esty, etc. Fortunately, we have people like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Robert Moss, Ray Cline, and a few thousand others who are
prepared to overlook our tradition of honesty in the face of the challenge
to our National Security. In short, they will lie without scruple and
create and/or disseminate fabrications, but they will call it "news man-
agement.'"' Fred Landis argues persuasively that the recent spurt in
rightwing attention to alleged Soviet disinformation and Soviet moles
was closely related to the new surge of disinformation by the very indi-
viduals levying the charges:^

Because this group planned to use the technique of disinformation within the

not be protested by Accuracy in Media or the State Department, Sterling and Henze have
been able to exclude contesting views from the media An official of one TV network in-
formed us that both Sterling and Henze refuse to appear on network programs with critics,
insisting on a de facto exercise of veto power over participants Only once in the years
1 982-85 was a dissident voice on the Bulgarian Connection heard on national TV On that
occasion, when Claire Sterling was confronted by Alexander Cockbum, we are informed
by network personnel thai Sterling had vetoed participation by the present writers and
Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post. When she appeared at the station and found that
Cockbum was also to be on the program, she was outraged, and only at the last moment
was persuaded not to walk out of the studio. See note 65 below on Henze 's even more
comprehensive prior restraints on media programming.
2. (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 1 18.

3 The same is true of their leader. See, e.g., Walter Karp, "Liberty Under Siege: The
Reagan Administration's Taste for Autocracy," Harper's, November 1985.

4 According to Amaud de Borchgrave, Free World spokespersons never produce "dis-
information," they only engage in "management of the news." See Fred Clarkson and
Louis Wolf, "Amaud de Borchgrave Boards Moon's Ship," CovertAclion Information
Bulletin. No. 24 (Summer 1985), p 35

5 ' 'Spies and the Reagan Victory: 'The October 22 Movement, ' " CovertAclion Infor-
mation Bulletin. Number 12 (April 1981), p. 36.

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

125

U.S. and because they realized that it would be used on such a scale as to raise
questions among thoughtful observers, they raised the issue in advance them-
selves.

The best defense is a good offense. And if the U .S. disinformationists
are able to command extensive and respectful attention in the mass
media, they can kill two birds with one stone: disseminate their own dis-
information, and protect themselves from serious criticism by threaten-
ing the media with accusations of being Soviet stooges in reporting any
dissenting fact or opinion.

Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen were the principal
exponents of the Bulgarian Connection in the United States in the years
1982-85. It is our belief that they were important participants in the cre-
ation of the Connection, as well as its leading disseminators. The ac-
counts which follow will show that they are disinformationists in the lit-
eral sense of the term." We will describe more fully in Chapter 7 their
dominance over the media's portrayal of the Bulgarian Connection.

Claire Sterling: Terrorism Pseudoscholar

For many years a journalist in Europe for the Reporter and other
magazines, with the publication of The Terror Network in 1981, Claire
Sterling became the leading publicist of the alleged Soviet-backed cam-
paign of international terrorism. This work, which was immediately
adopted as a fundamental text by the incoming Reagan administration,
established Sterling's credentials in the eyes of the western media. The
Terror Network, along with her more recent study of the papal assassi-
nation plot, The Time of the Assassins, and her frequent articles in the
New York Times and Wall Street Journal, can be analyzed as primary
materials in the study of the pseudoscience of terrorism.

This pseudoscience is illustrated by the infamous Lusk Report, a
product of a post- World War 1 investigation by the New York state leg-
islature which found a Red under every bed. Murray B. Levin describes

6. Disinformationists are thasc who originate and/or dispense disinformation. "Disin-
formation is an intelligence word which describes the coven attempt to manipulate the in-
formational environment of a selected target group by such actions as planted stories,
selective leaks, rumors, forged documents — all orchestrated toward a particular
theme " Ibid., p 35

126

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the methodology of this Red Scare classic as follows: 7

The data is presented without any effort — serious or otherwise — to evaluate its
validity or relevance. Generalizations and conclusions, unsupported by data, are
sprinkled throughout. . . . The pseudoscholar proceeds to laboriously accumu-
late vast numbers of "details" and documents. . . . Some of the details and
documents refer to facts. Some of the details are fiction. Nothing remains un-
explained. . . . The authors of the various parts of the report cite each other's
analysis as authoritative." Documents are taken at face value, regardless of their
source or the context within which they originally were presented. . . . Simul-
taneity is taken as proof of cause and effect. . . . Possibilities are invested into
certainties. Following the presentation of endless details, the conclusion is "in-
evitable." . . . [V]ast historical forces are assumed to be set in motion by the
mere will of a few monstrously evil but brilliant men. They pull puppet strings
and duped and compliant millions act out their will.

The qualities of the "pseudoscholar" are on full display in Sterling's
writings on terrorism in general, and on the Bulgarian Connection in
particular. We detail some of these qualities in the balance of this sec-
tion.

Manicheanism: Us versus them, good versus evil. Terrorism pseudo-
scholars are committed ideologues who divide the world into people,
movements, and states that are good and those that are evil. The former,
which usually coincides with the analyst's fellow citizenry, country,
leadership, and clients, are generous and kind, but also bumbling and
insufficiently alert to the need to be harsh with the forces of darkness.
The forces of evil are cruel, insidiously clever, and constantly plotting
the downfall of the forces of decency.

In the case of the plot to assassinate the Pope, Sterling is convinced of
Bulgarian-KGB guilt because this is just the kind of thing that the forces
of darkness do. The truth flows so easily from fundamental preconcep-
tions of good and evil that evidence is really required only for public re-
lations service. With or without evidence, one must choose. For exam-
ple, Sterling says that in "choosing sides" one must take one or the
other "on trust: the Italian judiciary or Bulgaria's Communist establish-
ment.'" 1 At the point when Sterling wrote these lines in 1983, the "Ital-

7 Op. cil., n. 2, pp 122-26.

8 See the discussion of the "echo chamber effect" in Chapter 7 under "The Intellectu-
als: Somnolence and Complicity."

9. The Time of the Assassins (New York: Holt, Rinehait and Winston, 1983), p 163

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

127

ian judiciary" had not "chosen." Antonov was being held for an inves-
tigation, but the investigating magistrate had not yet given an opinion,
and of course a trial had not been held. For a terrorism pseudoscholar,
however, the choice precedes careful investigation and a legitimate ju-
dicial finding. For the Sterlings of the 1920s, Sacco and Vanzetti were
guilty before the trial because they were on the wrong side and one had
to "choose."

Apologetics and coverup for rightwing terror. Sterling is a committed
rightist. In The Terror Network she provides systematic apologetics for
rightwing dictatorships, whose intelligence services are an important di-
rect and indirect source for her claims about terrorism. She does not use
the word "terrorism" to describe the torture and murder of political dis-
sidents by the Chilean, Argentinean, and South African police, and she
applies no indignant and sarcastic words to their actions. Even when
their operations fit the category of "international terrorism" very liter-
ally, such as in their cross-border assassinations 10 and preventive inva-
sions," they fail to arouse her ire.

Her apologetics for military dictatorships take two forms. First, she
repeatedly suggests that military takeovers were a consequence of left-
wing terrorist provocations. 12 This is a complete fabrication for the im-
portant cases of Chile and Brazil, and is a misleading half truth for
others. Her second mode of apologetics is to suppress the facts about
what her favored military dictatorships do. Even if they were "pro-
voked" into taking control of the state, how much killing, torture, and
dismantling of democratic institutions followed? Sterling carefully av-
erts her eyes, 13 as details on state terror would weaken the force of her
attempt to make rebel movements the exclusive "terrorists."

10 Under "Operation Condor" in the 1970s the security forces of Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay apprehended and murdered hundreds of dissidents by a col-
lective monitoring and assassination system across borders. See Edward S. Herman, The
Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (Boston: South End Press,
1982), pp. 69-73 Sterling has never discussed this terrorist enterprise

II. See Richard Leonard, South Africa At War (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill.
1973); Sean Gervasi, "Secret Collaboration: U S. and South Africa Foment Terrorist
Wars," Covert Action Information Bulletin. No. 22 (Fall 1984), pp. 36-40.

12 In The Terror Network (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), Sterling
states that "the wall of police states" in Latin America in the mid-1970s was "largely of
the terrorists' own making" (p 110)

13. She says in The Terror Network that rightwing terrorism has big plans and is "well
worth a book on its own" (p III), but she has not embarked «n this book as yet

128

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Sterling's identification with the state terrorists is illustrated by her
contrasting personal reactions to rebels and western officials in the kill-
ing business. She reports in The Terror Network that at one time she
found herself on a plane with a rebel terrorist who had been trained in
Havana, and "I was too frozen with fear to open my mouth." 14 On the
other hand, Sterling frequently cites conversations with representatives
of the secret police of the Free World, who kill as ruthlessly and at least
as frequently as her rebel, but she never mentions the slightest trepida-
tion or lack of sympathy. In fact, she tells us that: 15

One of my more memorable conversations in France was with a personage of
vast charm and qualified experience who assured me that he would brand me a
compulsive liar if I quoted him. If, now and then, I should notice a small news
item about a body washed up on a beach, he said, it might well be that of some
trained and unregenerate professional terrorist, sent on "a long, long voyage —
very long, madame," in the interests of preserving public order.

This was a "gentleman" of the Free World speaking to her, not a "ter-
rorist."

Sterling's The Terror Network is a running attack on liberation move-
ments in the Third World. She doesn't discuss how the West sustains
the conditions giving rise to them nor how it arms the military services
and death squads designed to keep the Third World majorities in their
place. Instead, she stresses the frequency with which these liberation
movements allegedly fall into the hands of leftists who are tools of Mos-
cow or one of its surrogates. Sterling demonstrates in The Terror Net-
work how it is possible for a rightwing journalist, by carefully ignoring
the massive violence and oppression of the terrorist states, and by con-
fining her attention to rebel violence and alleged rebel links (via arms
supply and training) to radical states, to make the terrorist states and
their allies look like victims, and the true victims look like baddies, wit-
tingly or unwittingly part of a plot to "destabilize Western Democ-
racy"!

It is interesting to see how Sterling deals with South Africa. She is
careful not to smear the South African liberation movements directly
and openly as terrorist, or to characterize the apartheid regime as fight-
ing terrorism. But she does this indirectly. At no point does she discuss
South African state terrorism against its black majority or its invasions

14. Ibid., p 248.

15. Ibid , p. (>8

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

129

and subversive acts against its neighbors. Instead she focuses exclu-
sively on alleged South African rebel ties to an external Red Network.
Thus the implicit smear process contains the following sequence: Some
rebels get some arms and training from the Soviet Union and its surro-
gates; the Soviets aim to destabilize the "democracies"; all the recipi-
ents of Soviet largesse are agents of a Communist Combat army; 16 there-
fore, all of these liberation movements are tainted as elements of the
master conspiracy.

In The Terror Network Sterling brings in South Africa very cautious-
ly, in a chapter on Henri Curiel, a Paris-based activist and supporter of
Third World liberation movements, whom she tries to make out to be a
KGB agent. (On her loss of a slander suit in Paris based on this accusa-
tion, see below.) In the course of that chapter she writes that all the
Palestinian terrorists could count on Curiel's support, and "so could the
front-line guerrilla forces of southern Africa, regularly supplied by Sol-
idarity [one of Curiel's organizations) with funds and clandestine equip-
ment.'" 7 Elsewhere in the same chapter she discusses the case of the
South African poet Breyton Breytenbach, who set up a printing plant for
the South African underground "and was soon arrested under the an-
literrorisl laws.""' (We may note in passing that Sterling doesn't use
quote marks, comment, or provide a word of sarcasm on this usage — as
she would perhaps if the Polish government arrested an underground
Solidarity worker under "antiterrorism laws ") She goes on to say that
just as an international campaign of appeal for Breytenbach was getting
under way, he pleaded guilty. She doesn't say what he pleaded guilty
to, but implies that this was meaningful, proving something like real
guilt. She states that he later suggested to his brother that he had been
"manipulated" in Paris; in Sterling's words, "Gradually the conviction
grew on Breytenbach that Solidarite fronted for a deep underground ap-
paratus providing technical services to international terrorist groups. " IV
Sterling gives no source for this information, very possibly provided her
by the South Afucan police. We may note also her seeming naivete on
the "growing conviction" which apparently came upon Breytenbach in
a South African prison. Although it is well publicized that "terrorists"
are regularly tortured in South African prisons, Sterling takes Breyten-
bach 's alleged reconsiderations at face value.

16 Ibid., p 16 See the subsection on The Conspiratorial Imperative, below

17. Ibid., p 54.

18. Ibid , p 51
19 Ibid , p 54.

130

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

At the time Sterling wrote on Breytenbach's admission of guilt there
was already in print an account of Breytenbach's trial in an Introduction
by Andre Brink to a translation of Breytenbach's A Season in
Paradise, 1 " which reads as follows:

After more than two months in detention he was brought to court on eleven
charges of what, in South Africa, passes for "terrorism." Many of the charges
were patently ridiculous, aod the fact that all the persons charged with Breyten-
bach were subsequently allowed to go scot-free seemed to corroborate this im-
pression. However, Breytenbach's interrogators had succeeded, during his
months of solitary confinement and constant interrogation, in convincing him
that he might well qualify for the death sentence should he try to contest the
charges in court. Consequently an arrangement was made whereby some of the
more far-fetched charges were dropped, in return for a plea of guilty to all the
others. The plea was accepted, with the result that a minimum of witnesses were
called.

Brink goes on to point out that in spite of this plea, Breytenbach got a
nine-year sentence, that all appeal was refused, and that the documents
in the case miraculously disappeared. Breytenbach himself, in a 1983
autobiography, also contradicts Sterling in both letter and in spirit. His
work is a crushing indictment of the South African system, which "is
against the grain of everything that is beautiful and hopeful and dig-
nified in human history. . . ," 21 Curiel, on the other hand, is one of
Breytenbach's heroes, "an inspiring man: a limpid ideologue, and a
man who remained committed to the better instincts in mankind." 22
Speaking of George Suffert, the journalist who, based on intelligence
leaks and forgeries, first attacked Curiel in print as a KGB agent, and on
whom Sterling relies heavily, Breytenbach calls him a "cowardly
French journalist ... the mouthpiece of the South African masters." 21
And on his trial and confession, Breytenbach says that given "the at-
mosphere of terror created by the powerful political police" his lawyers
felt obliged to tread very lightly. Of his short statement read to the court
in these circumstances, he says: "Read it — you will also hear the insidi-

20. (New York: Persca Books. 1980), pp 10-1 I

2 1 The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (New York: Farrar Slraus Giroux,
1983), p. 73
22. Ibid., p. 89

23 Ibid . p. SI Suffer! had on (he (op of his list of "terrorist" organizations the Afri-
can National Congress, which suggests that the South African secret police may have had
a hand in assisting Suffert's "researches" land indirectly, Claire Sterling's work).

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

131

ous voice of the controller in it." 24

The main point, however, is that in her not very subtle way Claire
Sterling succeeds in tarnishing South Africa's liberation movements by
tying them to the KGB — with no solid facts, no numbers, no evidence
that these ties, if they existed at all, were not marginal, and by relying
heavily on South African police interrogations for evidence. Focusing
on local South African conditions would suggest that the African Na-
tional Congress is fighting a ferociously terroristic and antidemocratic
regime in a thoroughly just cause. Sterling never allows such considera-
tions to surface — South Africa is part of the Free World, and she dis-
plays throughout her work a solidarity with it, its leaders, its secret
police, and other similar terror regimes.

Alt disagreements with her views are enemy propaganda and often
traceable to the Kremlin. Just as the world of states is divided into
blocs, so is the world of ideas. In criticizing Michael Dobbs of the
Washington Post, for example. Sterling asserts that Dobbs 's statements
lend "considerable credence to the Bulgarian argument. This is
taken as sufficient to invalidate Dobbs's argument. It also implies as a
matter of course that the Bulgarian contentions are incorrect. Sterling
never for a moment allows that she could be wrong.

In a speech on disinformation given in Paris on December 5, 1 984,-'*
Sterling attacked the effort of Italian newspapers to link what we call the
"second conspiracy" — the framing of the Bulgarians — to Ledeen,
Pazienza, and the U.S. and Italian secret services. She does this, not by
offering evidence, but by claiming to have traced the source of these al-
legations to a Communist paper in Italy and a Communist disinforma-
tion campaign. She does not give any evidence that these were the
sources, or that the alleged disinformation campaign had any success,
but she uses these assertions — essentially smears by association — to dis-
credit an alternative line of thought. 27

24. Ibid., p. 63.

25 Claire Sterling, "The Attack on the Pope: There's More lo the Slory," Washington
Post. August 7, 1984.

26 This speech was given at a conference on disinformation sponsored by Inter-
nationale de la Resistance, a coalition of rightwing resistance/'Miberation" organizations
and related support networks from Europe and the United States. John Barron of Reader's
Digest and Amaud de Borchgrave, an Adjunct Fellow of the Georgetown Center for Stra-
tegic and International Studies, were also in attendance We are cuing an offprint put out
by the sponsoring organization.

27 Henze works the same way In The Plot to Kill the Pope he spends a great deal of

132

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Uncritical use of disinformation sources. One of the main weapons of
terrorism pseudoscience is the use of convenient facts from intelligence
agencies and defectors (the latter often themselves creatures of the intel-
ligence agencies). Sometimes this is done knowingly — "planned gulli-
bility" — but it is often a reflection of the loss of critical capacity in the
search for proof of that which the pseudoscientist knows by instinct.

It is well established that all intelligence agencies will forge and plant
documents and lie where useful and practicable, so that from at least one
of them it is possible to obtain any desired "fact. ' ' Intelligence agencies
also operate in an environment in which political "crazies" can survive
and even flourish. For example, James Angleton, long-time CIA chief
of counterintelligence, was firmly convinced that the apparent Chinese-
Soviet hostility after 1959 was a conspiratorial deception to lull the
West into a false sense of security. 28 What theory of Red Conspiracy
would not be sincerely believed by some intelligence source and thus be
confirmable for a Claire Sterling?

In his book Deadly Deceits, former CIA officer Ralph McGehee
states that the CIA has "lied continually," and that "Disinformation is
a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people
are the primary target of its lies." 3 * Philip Agee's Inside the Company
provides dozens of examples of CIA sponsorship of violence, forging of
documents, and planting of fabricated stories with conduit journalists,

space on Soviet-Bulgarian responses to accusations of their involvement in the assassina-
tion attempt Most of this is a venomous caricature, providing a straw man enabling
Henze to attack weak arguments. More important, it also allows him to identify criticism
of the Connection with the Enemy. In an article "From Azeff to Agca," in Survey, a
Journal of East and West Studies. Autumn- Winter 1983, for example, he dismisses the
present writers as Soviet apologists, based on their article critical of the Bulgarian Con-
nection No evidence was given that they relied on Soviet sources or arguments, or that
they have any ties to the Soviets It is enough for Henze that (heir article contested the
Connection.

In the same article Henze refers to the Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu as "well known
as a purveyor of Soviet disinformation in Turkey." Mumcu, in fact, has been highly criti-
cal of alleged Bulgarian involvement in the Turkish drug traffic, and he has rejected An-
dronov's (Soviet) thesis that the CIA is behind the assassination attempt on the Pope. For
the former CIA station chief in Turkey to be calling anybody else, let alone Mumcu, a dis-
informationist is audacious, as we will discuss in the next section.

28. See Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp.
63, 289, 350.

29. Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan
Square Publications. 1982), p 192

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

133

often for the purpose of demonstrating Cuban dirty tricks. 30 E. Howard
Hunt, a long-time CIA agent working with the Nixon "plumbers,"
even forged a document, with CIA knowledge and logistical support, in
a 1971 effort to embarrass Senator Edward Kennedy by publicly im-
plicating John F. Kennedy in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem of
South Vietnam." If CIA operatives will lie to discredit a U.S. president
for political purposes, of what would they be capable regarding foreign
enemies?

Although disinformation is one of her favorite words, to our knowl-
edge Claire Sterling has never admitted that there is such a thing as
western disinformation. In her Paris speech on disinformation, she as-
serts with disdain that a Soviet author on the Bulgarian Connection,
Iona Andronov, "is a colonel of the KGB attached for the duration of
the Papal plot to the Literaturnaya Gazeta. . . ."" The implication is
that, as a KGB officer, Andronov could hardly be taken seriously as a
purveyor of information. Whatever the truth of her contention about An-
dronov 's KGB affiliation, it is noteworthy that Paul Henze is not con-
taminated in her eyes by his extensive intelligence career. In the Mani-
chean world of Sterling and her associates, the intelligence agencies on
our side do not lie, forge documents, or engage in disinformation strate-
gies; only those on the enemy side do these things. Whether this is de-
liberate suppression of known fact or the self-deception of the true be-
liever, it makes Sterling a superb instrument of propaganda.

Claire Sterling has long used, and served as a conduit for, the Free
World's intelligence agencies. In The Terror Network, she has 37 cita-
tions directly to intelligence sources, 31 of them anonymous, with still
larger numbers of references to individuals and works that themselves
depend heavily on intelligence sources (Brian Crozier, Robert Moss,

30. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Stonehill, 1975), pp
145-46, 279-81, 283-87, 292-95, 453-57, 468-69, 471-72. And see Warner Poelchau,
ed . , White Paper Whitewash: Philip Agee on the CI A and El Salvador (New York: Deep
Cover Publications, 1981), pp. 28-41.

31. E. Howard Hunt, Undercover (New York: Putnam, 1974), pp. 178-81 And see
Powers, op. cit., n. 28, pp 254-55; Poelchau, ed , op. cit., n. 30. p. 38.

32. Op. cit., n 26. Andronov vigorously denies the charge, with considerable logic
Sterling was apparently unaware that he had been, quite openly, the Literaturnaya Gazeta
correspondent in the United States from 1972 to 1978, or that his work has appeared regu-
larly in that newspaper for more than 15 years. Moreover, in 1985 he returned to New
York to resume his foreign correspondent's work in this country, with the consent of the
United States government. If anyone other than Claire Sterling thought he was a nefarious
KGB colonel, is it likely he would have received such permission?

134

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

John Barron)." Conor Cruise O'Brien observes in his review of The
Terror Network that Sterling "consistently assumes that anything she is
told by her western intelligence sources must be true. Her copious but
naive footnotes often refer to unnamed intelligence sources, whose ver-
acity she simply takes for granted." 14

In her use of Italian intelligence sources, Sterling quotes frequently
from reports of SISMI, an intelligence agency run for a number of years
by General Santovito, a member of P-2 and a sponsor of Francesco
Pazienza. P-2, as we have seen, was an illegal rightwing conspiracy that
heavily infiltrated the Italian intelligence, police, and army and whose
members were involved earlier in major disinformation efforts, includ-
ing the forging and planting of documents. " Sterling always quotes a
SISMI statement as authoritative fact, never as one from a potential dis-
information source. Nowhere in The Terror Network, nor in The Time of
the Assassins, does she so much as mention P-2 or the "strategy of ten-
sion" pursued for many years by Italy's right wing, including elements
of the security services. This non-discussion is essential to preserving
the appearance of authenticity and integrity of handouts from SISMI.

As we noted earlier, in The Terror Network Sterling also passed on
the claims of unidentified "intelligence sources" that Henri Curiel was
a KGB agent. Sterling's comrade-in-disinformation, Amaud de Borch-
grave, asserted that it was an "open secret" in the intelligence world
that Curiel was a KGB agent. 16 As Curiel had already been murdered by
unknown assailants, his family and several associates sued Sterling for
slander in the French courts. French secret police documents provided

33 Philip Paull, International Terrorism: The Propaganda Wur, M A Thesis in Inter-
national Relations, San Francisco State University, June 1982. p 73

34 "The Roots of Terrorism," New Republic, July 25, 1981 When her sources say
something convenient to her argument. Sterling's gullibility shows no limits O'Brien
gives an excellent illustration in his review in discussing Sterling's treatment of the Irish
Provos An even more spectacular example was her swallowing without blinking the
"Tucuman Plan," supposedly prepared "underKGB supervision" in Argentina's Tucu-
man province in May 1975, and calling for the mobilization of 1.500 Latin American "ter-
rorists" to be sent to Europe for an orchestrated destabilization effort For a detailed dis-
cussion of this and other illustrations of her use of intelligence disinformation, see Diana
Johnstone. "Disinformation: The 'fright story' of Claire Sterling's tales of terrorism,'' In
These Times, May 20-26, 1981

35 See Chapter 4, pp 81-99

36 See the letter to George Suffert by de Borchgravc, reproduced in Frank Brodhead
and Edward S Herman, "The KGB Plot to Assassinate the Pope: A Case Study in Free
World Disinformation," CoverlAction Information Bulletin. No 19 (Spring-Summer
1983), p 15

SIX: THE DIS1NFORMATIONISTS

135

in connection with this judicial proceeding showed no evidence what-
soever of Curiel having a KGB connection. Thus, in this rare event
where the cover of "confidential sources" was lifted by legal process,
the western intelligence service closest to Curiel's activities revealed de
Borchgrave and Sterling to be playing a disinformation role, perhaps
serving as a conduit for the same intelligence service that organized
Curiel's murder. Sterling lost one of the slander suits and was assessed a
fine; another she slipped out of on legal technicalities and by the court's
acceptance of her claim that she had not accused Curiel of being a KGB
agent, but was merely presenting a "hypothesis."" The Curiel trials,
which bear so clearly on Sterling's credibility, were reported upon only
in the back pages of the Washington Post, and were unmentioned in the
New York Times, Time, or Newsweek, or on the TV networks. 1 "

Defectors are also a prime source of information for Sterling. The use
and abuse of defector evidence is discussed in more detail in Appendix
C, but we note here that Sterling's The Terror Network rests heavily on
the testimony of General Jan Sejna, a Czech defector of 1968, who, ac-
cording to Sterling, had defected "a jump ahead of the invading Soviet
army" during the Czech Spring." This is a fabrication — Sejna was an
old Stalinist who defected in the middle of the Czech Spring, ^ long be-
fore the invasion, and in the midst of a corruption scandal in which
Sejna was a principal."' Sejna was so forthcoming in his debriefings that
the CIA finally decided to test his veracity by forging a document with
elaborate but phony details on Soviet sponsorship of terrorism. Sejna
immediately claimed the document to be authentic — it was one that had
just slipped his mind! 42 Ten years later, Michael Ledeen got Sejna to re-

37 See Jonathan Randal. "French Socialists Seek to Solve Slaying of Alleged Master
Spy . " ' Washington Post, August 19, 1 98 1 , and ' 'Court in Paris Fines Author of Terrorism
Book," Washington Post, March 30, 1982. Sterling made no effort in the Paris trial to
prove the truth of her case by innuendo — she and her publisher used her reliance on the
methodology of terrorism pseudoscience to disclaim having said anything definite

38 In connection with the Curiel cases. Sterling was given unusual assistance by the
CIA in aid of her defense against accusations of slander. See note 63 below

39. Op. cit., n. 12, p. 290.

40. According to Leslie Gelb, "The defector. Major Gen Jan Sejna, was said to have
been closely associated with Antonin Novotny, the Stalinist party leader of Czecho-
slovakia. The General fled to the United Stales in early 1968 after Mr. Novotny had been
replaced by Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the short-lived liberalization period."
"Soviet-Terror Ties Called Outdated," New York Times. October 18. 1981.

41 . See Diana Johnstone, "The 'fright story' of Claire Sterling's tales of terrorism," In
These Times. May 20-26, 1981.

42. Lars-Erik Nelson. "The deep terror plot: a thickening of silence," New York Daily

136

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

peat this scenario, and this evidence constitutes the heart of Sterling's
proof of a Soviet terror network^ 1 This should have discredited Sterling
completely and permanently , but she is under mass media protection for
valuable services rendered and it appears that no fabrication or lunacy
(see below under The Conspiratorial Imperative) can render her less
than an authentic expert.

The manipulation of evidence. Sterling's misuse of evidence assumes
many forms. One is to twist words to alter meanings. In The Terror Net-
work, for example, Sterling purports to quote directly from a CIA re-
port:"

"Warsaw Pact members' assistance to terrorists originates in Pankow (East
Germany) and Prague,'' said the CIA in "International and Transnational Ter-
rorism," April 1976, p. 21 of the CIA's Annual Report.

What the CIA report actually says is: "In any event, the only hard
evidence of Warsaw Pact member assistance to individuals associated
with the Baader-Meinhof Gang points to Pankow and Prague." Ster-
ling's bogus quote distorts the meaning of the real quote. The CIA re-
port speaks of "the only hard evidence" of assistance to individuals
"associated with" a specific terrorist group (as opposed to the more
generic and broader-based usage of the word "terrorists"). The original
does not say that Warsaw Pact assistance "originates" in Pankow and
Prague as Sterling writes, but "points to" Pankow and Prague, a looser
connection. If this is what happens to verifiable quotes in Sterling's
work, what happens to those quotes which are not verifiable?

Sterling's erroneous citations are numerous. In The Time of the As-
sassins, for example, she says that Bulgaria was responsible for "four-
fifths of the arms reaching the Middle East." 4 ' Her source for this
whopper, the New York Times of February 9, 1983, actually states that
Israeli intelligence authorities attributed to Bulgarian sources four-fifths
of the weapons the Israelis had captured from the PLO. As another il-

News. June 24, 1984, p. CI4. In 1981, when then Secretary of Stale Alexander Haig
asked the CIA to "produce the kind of evidence that Ms. Sterling had cited in her book

. . the CIA shamefacedly confessed that it was being asked to confirm its own phony
document — and Haig had to let the issue drop."

43. See The Terror Network, pp. 14. 34, 221 . 290-92.

44 Ibid., p. 341.

45 the Time of the Assassins, p. 2 1 1

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

137

lustration, she states that a SISMI report describes the gun dealer Horst
Grillmaier as having "traveled often to Syria, East Germany, and other
countries of Eastern Europe." 4 * Looking up her reference, the SISMI
report in question mentions Grillmaier in passing and does not say a
word about his alleged travels to Syria and East Germany.

Another form of manipulation of evidence is her selective use of
some facts, her suppression of others, and her simple refusal to discuss
conflicting facts. As we discuss below, Sterling attempts to tie the
leftwing Minister of the Interior in the Ecevit government, Hasan Fehmi
Gunes, to Agca's escape from a Turkish prison in 1 979. To show that he
was a "leftist" she refers to him as a "Marxist" and mentions that his
brother was a radical. The Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu, who knew
Gunes well, says that Gunes never considered himself a Marxist and
that the term was not properly applied to him. Mumcu also points out
that Gunes had another brother, who was a conservative, whose exist-
ence somehow escaped Sterling's notice."

Another illustration of Sterling selectivity and suppression is her han-
dling of Agca's letter in which he expressed his devotion to Tiirkes, the
leader of the fascist Nationalist Action Party of Turkey. She and Henze
do not like this letter, as it shows a rightwing political commitment that
they consistently try to downplay as they strive to make Agca into a
mercenary terrorist without politics. Sterling therefore dismisses the let-
ter as a "laughably clumsy forgery.'""' A problem, however, is that this
letter was introduced as evidence in a trial in Ankara by the Turkish mil-
itary government, usually adequate proof for Sterling of authenticity.
This provides considerable insight into Sterling's methods. On the one
hand, if we have a "laughably clumsy forgery," what do we conclude
about the quality of the Turkish judicial system that admits such a docu-
ment into evidence? On the other hand, perhaps we should look more
closely at the Turkish evidence, which Sterling does not find it conve-
nient to do in this instance. Ugur Mumcu devotes five pages of his book
Agca Dossier to a detailed account of the Tiirkes letter. He reports that
the Turkish military government went to great pains to analyze its au-
thenticity, putting it through many tests at the police laboratory and hir-
ing an outside consultant from the Department of Graphic Arts at Istan-
bul University to study the document. The conclusion on all sides was

46 Ibid., p. 34.

47 Ugur Mumcu. Papa. Mafya, Agca (Istanbul: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984), p 205.
48. The Time of the Assassins, p. 70

138

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

that the letter was authentic. 4 '

Equally interesting, Sterling mentions that after his arrest for shooting
Ipekci, even after a week or so in the hands of the police, Agca appeared
in court without the slightest evidence of police maltreatment, which
Sterling remarks was "customary under whatever political regime in
Turkey. " 50 When the military took over in 1980, torture was stepped up
and many individuals died under torture. Neither Sterling nor Henze
discuss this, nor do they allow it to qualify their faith in evidence from
this source. So Sterling mentions police brutality when it serves her con-
venience (here to suggest that maybe Agca was being protected from on
high), but usually ignoring it in reference to a favored police state.

In her Reader's Digest article, Sterling traced Agca's gun to the pre-
viously mentioned Horst Grillmaier, an Austrian gun merchant who, ac-
cording to Sterling, had fled behind the Iron Curtain after May 13,
1981, to avoid questioning in the West. It turned out later that
Grillmaier was a former Nazi who specialized in supplying rightwing
gun-buyers; that he had not disappeared behind the Iron Curtain at all;
and that the gun had gone through a number of intermediaries before Fi-
nally being passed to Agca by a Gray Wolves friend. In the last pre-trial
version of Agca's story, the Bulgarians supposedly gave him a package,
including his gun, on May 13, 1981. Why would Agca have given up
his gun to the Bulgarians, to have them return it to him on May 13? Why
would the Bulgarians have had to go through all the transactions with
Grillmaier and others to provide Agca with a gun, given their extensive
facilities in Rome?

Sterling handles the disintegration of the original Grillmaier line in
typical Sterling fashion, by simply shifting to new conspiratorial
ground. Thus instead of showing a Bulgarian Connection by
Grillmaier' s eastern links, she tums things on their head — the sinister
Bulgarians had Agca purchase a gun through a known fascist to
strengthen the suggestion that Agca was a rightwinger who could not
possibly be connected with the Communist powers! The Grillmaier
readjustments show well that no matter what happens to facts, the Ster-
ling methodology will yield the prescribed conclusions.

Possibly the most enterprising Sterling innovation in her efforts to
rationalize Agca's lies and retractions is her elaboration of a signaling
theory. According to this theory, if Agca releases evidence on the Bul-

49. Ugur Mumcu, Agca Dosyasi (Ankara: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984), pp. 106-10.

50. The Time of the Assassins, p. 48.

SIX: THE DISINFORMATION1STS

139

garian Connection slowly, makes mistakes, or retracts evidence, he is
trying to convey a message to his sponsors. He is warning them to do
something, or that he will say more. The empirical foundation for this
notion was Agca's behavior in the last days of his trial in Turkey for the
shooting of lpekci, in October 1979, when he issued in court an explicit
warning, that he had things to tell that some people would regret. Sev-
eral days later the Gray Wolves heeded his message and he was escorted
out of prison. According to Sterling, Agca adopted the same strategy
after his imprisonment for shooting the Pope. The most important in-
stance of Agca's alleged signaling in Rome came in June 1983, when a
Vatican official's daughter, Emmanuela Orlandi, was abducted. A few
days later, on June 28, Agca withdrew key elements of his previous tes-
timony. To this day Sterling claims that by his renunciation Agca was
signaling to his Bulgarian sponsors that he wanted to be either ex-
changed or rescued from prison."

There are many difficulties with the signaling theory as an explana-
tion of Agca's behavior in Rome. For one thing, he delayed his signal-
ing for a very long time. Why? Then when he started to talk, in May
1982, he did so without any known prior signal; i.e., without warning
his sponsors of his intentions (as in the lpekci case). Furthermore, in
Rome neither the Gray Wolves nor the Bulgarians would be in a posi-
tion to spring Agca in a prison break, and the idea that Agca would ex-
pect the Bulgarians to bargain for his release is far-fetched. His crime
was one for which the Italians would not be likely to engage in political
bargaining for a release. Even more important, to bargain the Bulgar-
ians would have to acknowledge openly their own involvement in the
plot. On Sterling logic, the Bulgarian-KGB strategy was to establish
enough distance from the hired killer to be able to make a case for non-
involvement. Even Agca would realize that any signals to the Bulga-
rians and Soviets would be fruitless.

There are other problems with Sterling's signaling theory. Why did
Agca produce inconsistent signals? While he retracted some of his

S I See the discussion of the Emmanuela Orlandi case in Chapter 2, pp. 33-35. Agca
eventually adopted the signaling theory himself. After a particularly bizarre series of ac-
cusations and withdrawals while testifying in court, Agca refused to talk for several days.
He then told the court that a kidnapping was part of a pre-arranged plan, and that "the
Gray Wolves and the Bulgarians kidnapped Emmanuela Orlandi so that I would retract the
accusations against them, confuse the trial, and then I was to discredit the western press. "
("In New Account Agca Tells of a Fourth Turk at Shooting of John Paul," New York
Times [AP], July 2, 1985 )

140

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

major claims just after the Orlandi kidnapping, he also made wild alle-
gations of KGB and Bulgarian involvement in the assassination attempt
at an impromptu press conference on July 8, 1983, just 10 days after his
retraction. If he was trying to mend his fences with his would-be
liberators on June 28, why would he publicly assail them shortly there-
after? Furthermore, how would his sponsors-rescuers know that he had
made his retractions, and, in effect, receive his signals?" They were not
reported in the press at the time, and were made public only when the
Albano Report was leaked a year later.

Thus, the signaling hypothesis is neither plausible nor capable of ex-
plaining the actual pattern of confessions, errors, and retractions. The
coaching hypothesis fits comfortably. It explains Agca's slow start by
the circumstance that initially he had nothing to confess about the Bul-
garians. Later on, the pump was primed: Agca was first persuaded and/
or coerced to talk, and he was then given the basic data needed to get the
Connection rolling. His enlarging "knowledge" came from the press,
secret prison briefings, and other connections with the outside, as well
as his own fertile imagination and quest for publicity. His retractions
were the result of the disclosure of incompatible facts and contradictions
that required the overworked slate to be tidied up. As we noted earlier,
he mentioned Celenk only after reading a book by Mumcu on the Turk-
ish-Bulgarian smuggling connection in which Celenk's name appeared.
He withdrew his claim that his fleeing accomplice at St. Peter's Square
on May 13 was the Bulgarian Aivazov only days after western reporters
attending a press conference in Sofia were able to witness for them-
selves (and report) that Aivazov 's physical characteristics were totally at
odds with those of the individual in the photo. Agca's major retraction
of June 1983, acknowledging that he had never met Mrs. Antonov or
visited the Antonovs' apartment, followed press accounts of the defense
counsel's having obtained substantial evidence that Mrs. Antonov had
not been in Rome at the time of Agca's alleged rendezvous.

A key element in Sterling's argument that the Pope plot was con-
trolled by the Soviet Union has always been her account of the events
surrounding Agca's escape from a Turkish prison in November 1979.
Both in her original Reader's Digest article and in her later book she
tries hard to tie that escape to a social democratic Minister of the Inte-

52 We pointed out in Chapter 2 that the retraction preceded the kidnapper's demand
that Agca be released.

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

141

rior, Hasan Fehmi Gunes, who she implies was complicit in Agca's
prison break. Sterling says that "he [Agca] could not have done it with-
out high level help." This is not true. It would seem quite possible to
organize an escape if a prisoner has as allies a large number of the
prison's guards and officers. And, in fact, the Gray Wolves and NAP
were extremely well represented at Agca's prison. According to official
accounts, about a dozen members of the Gray Wolves, three of them
soldiers, dressed Agca in a military uniform and conducted him through
eight security checkpoints to a waiting car. There is no doubt that this
was a Gray Wolves operation, and in February 1982 three Gray Wolves
conspirators were sentenced to prison by a Turkish martial law court for
having helped Agca to escape.

After noting that Gunes was a radical, Sterling points out that at his
trial Agca "waited in what appeared to be the expectation of getting
sprung," and in mid-October he told the court that he had been offered a
deal by Gunes: If he admitted membership in the NAP he would get off.
Two weeks later, says Sterling, Agca told the court that "1 did not kill
Ipekci, but I know who did." He added "that he would reveal the true
assassin's name at the court's next sitting. It was an explicit warning to
his patrons to get him out," says Sterling, "and that is what they did."

It is clear that Sterling is trying to implicate Gunes — "a radical well
to the left of Ecevit" — in Agca's prison break. Her assertion that high
level help was necessary, as we have seen, is not convincing. Further-
more, she gives not a shred of evidence that Gunes had any Soviet ties
or that he had anything to do with the escape. Finally , she either doesn ' t
know or suppresses the important fact that Agca gave his courtroom
speech at the very time when a new conservative government was being
formed, after Ecevit's more liberal government had lost its parliamen-
tary majority in mid-October. Thus, Agca's escape was engineered two
weeks after Gunes had been replaced and a new conservative govern-
ment — which had been a long-time ally of the Gray Wolves and NAP —
had taken office.

The press is being overwhelmed by KGB propaganda. A favorite theme
of Sterling and her colleagues is that the press regularly plays into the
hands of the enemy. Sterling uses the Bulgarian Connection as an illus-
tration of the successes of KGB disinformation. In her Paris Conference
speech. Sterling claimed that disbelief in the Connection was a result of a
Soviet-inspired propaganda barrage. She noted that the Soviets sent the
40-page book on the Plot by "KGB Colonel" Iona Andronov to "every

142

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

important or unimportant journalist, columnist, newspaper commen-
tator, television commentator, editor, of every western newspaper that I
know of, in Europe and in the United States." This operation had great
effect according to Sterling; disbelief in the Connection has become
"the accepted position, the socially indispensable position. . . . Pro-
digious effort and one of the world's most expert craftsmanship [sic]
had gone into generating such doubts." 53 At no point does she present
evidence that Andronov's work was read, or that it influenced anybody
in the West. Its theme, that the CIA was behind Agca's assassination at-
tempt, has never been espoused or taken seriously in any mainstream
publication in the United States or Western Europe. Andronov's book
has been mentioned in the western media solely in derogatory references
by Claire Sterling and Paul Henze.

Sterling asserts in The Time of the Assassins that if only she had ar-
gued for a CIA connection, her message would have been welcome. She
portrays herself as a latter-day Joan of Arc, fighting a lonely battle
against the forces of the establishment."' If only she had taken the easy
road and blamed things on the CIA, "my fortune would have been
made" — but the indomitable Sterling was blaming it on the KGB, and
this message was very hard for the American elite to swallow. Despite
the lunatic quality of this assertion, no establishment book review or ar-
ticle has ever noted the contradiction between Sterling's claims that she
has been rejected by the U.S. political and media elite because of their
detente-induced bias, and her obvious commercial and journalistic suc-
cesses.

Sterling's vision of the media stands the truth on its head. Western
propaganda sources are vastly more powerful and believable in the West
than Soviet sources, as exemplified by former CIA propaganda officer
Henze's role and authority and alleged KGB officer Andronov's effec-
tive nonexistence. Sterling and Henze are propaganda sources, or oper-
ate in close collusion with them, and they have full access to the mass
media. Furthermore, there is a will-to-believe in the villainy of the

53. The Time of the Assassins, p. 141.

54. Of course, she did have the benefit of generous funding from the Reader's Digest
Association, and the built-in audience of many millions that it commands. Sterling herself
notes in The Time of ihe Assassins that "It isn't every day that a reporter gets an offer like
the one 1 had from Reader's Digest: take as long as you like . . . " (p 4). She gives spe-
cific numbers for the cost of the ABC 20/20 program of May 13, 1983, which raised
doubts about the Bulgarian Connection. In contrast, she never provides dollar figures for
her own expenses or those of the NBC programs with which she was affiliated and which
peddled her line

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

143

enemy in every country. In the case of the Bulgarian Connection this has
helped to overcome doubts that might arise from the absence of evi-
dence and the implausible and shifting scenarios dispensed by Agca. It
is in such a world that a Claire Sterling can thrive.

The conspiratorial imperative. Another essential feature of terrorism
pseudoscience is the elaboration of leftwing conspiracies. In The Terror
Network the great conspiracy is of course the Soviet Union's attempt to
destabilize the western democracies by aiding assorted dissidents and
rebels. Sterling makes the blanket statement that all of these aided par-
ties "come to see themselves as elite battalions in a worldwide Army of
Communist Combat."" Terrorists aid one another and act as if unified.
Killed terrorists "are unfailingly replaced," and defeats lead to changes
in "pressure points," suggestive of a central planning body.

She also says that there is "nothing random in this concentrated as-
sault," noting that the Red Brigades, "who like to think that they speak
for many or most of their kind . . . have even published a terror timeta-
ble. " 56 Sterling doesn't tell us how she knows what the Red Brigades
like to think, but the truly Sterlingesque trick here is her use of this
phony Red Brigade spokesmanship and timetable to establish nonran-
domness, to suggest that the Red Brigades really do speak for all recipi-
ents of Soviet aid and that they all have a timetable!

What is the proof that the Soviets aim to destabilize western democ-
racies? Sterling has nothing in the way of evidence except a few stale as-
sertions of defectors. Her claim is an ideological premise of terrorism
pseudoscience. Would destabilization of the West benefit the Soviet
Union? For Sterling the answer is obvious and she doesn't discuss it.
And her proofs of Soviet sponsorship of destabilizing terror, by selec-
tive illustration, all disintegrate upon close inspection.

She tries hard, for example, to tie the KGB to the Italian Red
Brigades, and to their assassination of former Italian Prime Minister
Aldo Moro. But Moro was murdered precisely because of his role in en-

55. The Terror Network, p. 16. Sterling later contradicts herself, noting that "Not all
those who took the Cubans and Russians up on their aid offer were for sale, or even for
rent. Many have proven to be a headache to their former benefactors " This suggests that
some unknown but possibly very large fraction of those aided did not see themselves as a
part of the "Army of Communist Combat," and that the Soviets didn't "control" the ter-
ror network. Sterling even concedes at various points that there is no central direction,
only "links," and arms sales (pp. 10, 16). But these contradictions don't interfere with
reiteration of her incompatible generalization.

56. Ibid., p. 7

144

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

gineering the "Historic Compromise," that sought to bring the Com-
munist Party into a greater role in governing Italy. The Red Brigades
fought violently against the Italian Communist Party, and the Com-
munist Party was the strongest proponent of a policy of harsh repression
against the Red Brigades. The murder of Aldo Moro was a major set-
back for the Communist Party and for ddtente. Was it in the interest of
the Soviet Union to weaken the Italian Communist Party and ddtente? Is
it not curious that killing Aldo Moro was a key element in a rightwing
coup plan (Plan Solo) of 1964?" If the Red Brigades are an instrument
of Soviet policy, is the Italian Communist Party not only independent of
the Soviet Union but its actual enemy? Sterling never addresses any of
these questions.

Sterling and Henze claim, without presenting any evidence, that the
Soviet Union was pouring resources into Turkey to ' 'destabilize' ' that
country in the 1970s. Again, given the power of Turkey's military es-
tablishment, wasn't this foolish, likely to produce a military coup domi-
nated by anti-Soviet forces? Furthermore, the terrorist acts themselves
were in the majority rightwing attacks and murders, largely against left-
ist forces or areas. How would sponsoring rightwing terror help the
Soviet Union? Sterling never tells us. She notes in The Terror Network
that the military takeover of 1980 was "hardly in a manner living up to
Soviet expectations." 58 It never occurs to Sterling that her understand-
ing of Soviet expectations might be wrong and that the Soviet destabili-
zation hypothesis, so conspicuously irrational and contrary to Soviet in-
terests, might also be in error.

Sterling argues that the Soviet motive for shooting the Pope was to
stop the Solidarity movement. Apart from its other deficiencies of logic
and evidence, 59 this argument fails because shooting the Pope could not
reasonably have been expected to stop the Solidarity movement. Fur-
thermore, the risks involved in such an action would be very great, in-
cluding the high probability that the shooting would be attributed to the
Soviet Bloc. In their rational self-interest Soviet officials would have
anticipated this and avoided any such risky and exceptionally stupid
ventures. 60

57. S»e Chapter 4, p. 79.

58. The Terror Network, p. 245.

59. See Chapter 2, pp. 14-15.

60 In Sterling's version of her interview with former Turkish Interior Minister Gunes,
he made the point that, given the predictable results of an assassination attempt — that is,
ready accusations and blame accruing to the Soviets — it would be a plausible rightwing

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

145

The most remarkable conspiracy doctrine in Sterling's works is her
contention that the truth of the Bulgarian Connection has had to pene-
trate a longstanding "western intelligence shield" protecting the Soviet
Union, which for many years has been concealing f rom public view the
truth about Soviet terrorism. 61 The reason for the establishment coverup
is that the truth was too shocking and would disturb international
equilibrium and detente.

These contentions are crackpot nonsense. In order to facilitate its
rearmament program and to help place new missiles in Europe, from
1981 onward the Reagan administration desperately sought means of
portraying the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. The Bulgarian Connec-
tion was exceptionally helpful in achieving that objective. If the absurd
notion that Reagan seeks to protect detente failed to dent Sterling's cred-
ibility in the United States, it is a testimonial to the establishment's tol-
erance of congenial and serviceable propaganda.

What are we to make of the expressions of doubts about the Bulgarian
Connection by the CIA and other government officials, and their refusal
to embark on a massive propaganda campaign? One reason for their
caution is that many officials probably knew that the Connection was a
creation of Sterling, Henze, and the Italian secret services, and was thus
unsustainable in the long run. The wise strategy, therefore, was to allow
and encourage Sterling and her propaganda cohorts to milk the Plot for
all it was worth, while the Reagan administration remained publicly un-
committed and ambivalent. This would permit a great deal of publicity,
some even generated by debates between the Sterling forces and the am-
bivalent CIA, while giving the government an emergency exit.

A second reason for U.S. government caution is that it makes the CIA
a "moderate" critic in the debates on the truth or falsity of the Connec-
tion. With Sterling, Henze, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, and Zbigniew
Brzezinski accusing the CIA of dragging its feet, the CIA becomes an
anti-establishment truth seeker (which it is not) rather than an instru-
ment of the administration (which it is). Thus the debate on the case can
be reasonably restricted to Sterling and company on the right and the
CIA on the left."

move, "to provoke a Polish revolt, and pull Poland out ot the Warsaw Pact " The Time of
the Assassins, p. 79. Sterling Fails to discuss the point, as usual refusing to consider alter-
native hypotheses or the weaknesses of her own

61 Although this point is strewn throughout her The Time of the Assassins, it is fea-
tured prominently in an exclusive interview with Sterling entitled "Why is the West Cov-
ering Up for Agca." Human Events, April 21 , 1984

62 See the discussion in Chapter 7 of Robert Tolh' s article in the Los Angeles Times on

146

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

A third reason for U.S. government reticence in commenting on the
Connection was that the case was still being adjudicated in the Italian
courts. For the U.S. government to organize an open press campaign ar-
guing KGB guilt would be a blatant interference with the Italian legal
process and would therefore be badly conceived even as a public rela-
tions strategy.

A final reason for official U.S. restraint is that the public relations job
was being handled very well by the private sector, led by Claire Sterling
and her friends. As we will describe in the next chapter, they dominated
the media and established the Bulgarian Connection as true for the gen-
eral public. Further government inputs have been unneeded. We believe
that Sterling and her friends are well regarded by the administration and
served a key role in propagandizing the case exactly as the administra-
tion desired. Sterling's assertions of administration and CIA cowardice
are understood to be the crankish outbursts of a very serviceable instru-
ment, who has an important part to play in a common enterprise. 63

Paul Henze: "Specialist in U.S. Propaganda"

Paul Henze began his long CIA career under Defense Department cover
as a "foreign affairs adviser" in 1950. Two years later, he began a six-
year hitch as a policy adviser to Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich,
West Germany." By 1969, Henze was CIA chief of station in Ethiopia,

CIA opinion on the case and the Sterling reaction. This was in Tact the lineup of contes-
tants organized on a MacNeil/Lehrer program in January 1983.

63. In spite of her attacks on the CIA for cowardice and footdragging, the CIA entered
into an agreement with Sterling to help her out of her legal difficulties in the Curiel case.
By a signed agreement of March 24, 1983, the CIA provided Sterling with an Affidavit
verifying that the published document "International Terrorism in 1978" from which
Sterling had quoted was in fact an official CIA document, and that, going beyond the as-
sertions of the 1978 report, the CIA was prepared to swear that Curiel "headed an appa-
ratus that provided technical support to groups that engaged in terrorist acts." The CIA
also agreed to provide Sterling with any documents subsequently released to anybody else
on Curiel under the Freedom of Inf ormation Act. As Sterling's counsel noted in a letter to
Sterling dated March 24, 1978, "That means that you do not have to wait on the Freedom
of Information Act line. The Office of General Counsel [of the CIA] will tag your file and
respond expeditiously." It is not everybody that gets this kind of expedited and special
service from the CIA.

64. Inthe early 1970s, a time of increased interest in the activities of U.S. intelligence
agencies, it was learned that the Munich-based RFE of the 1950s was controlled by the
CIA, which managed RFE's Cold War propaganda.

SIX: THE DISINFORMATION1STS

147

and he served as station chief in Turkey from 1974 through 1977. When
Zbigniew Brzezinski assembled his National Security Council team for
President Jimmy Carter, Henze was hired as the CIA's representative to
the NSC office in the White House. Throughout Henze 's determined
media campaign to link the Soviet Union to the shooting of the Pope, in-
cluding his articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science
Monitor, and in his regular appearances on the MacNeil/Lehrer News
Hour, Henze has consistently refused to allow himself to be identified as
a former career officer of the CIA." A case in point is the jacket cover
of his book, The Plot to Kill the Pope, where Henze is described as fol-
lows:

Paul Henze spent thirty years in various government and government-related or-
ganizations, including Radio Free Europe and U.S. Embassies in Ethiopia and
Turkey. During 1977-1980 he was a key member of Zbigniew Brzezinski's Na-
tional Security Council Staff. Since his retirement from government, Henze has
been a free-lance writer, lecturer, and business consultant.

Thus, Henze' s readers are not informed that his position in the "U.S.
Embassies in Ethiopia and Turkey" was as CIA station chief, and that
as "a key member of Zbigniew Brzezinski's National Security Council
Staff he was the CIA liaison to the White House. In addition, even
though much of his book is written in the first person narrative style
("The sun had just set, bringing to an end a cool, bright autumn day
when I stepped off the bus near the central square of Malatya. ... I had
come to probe Mehmet Ali Agca's background"), there isn't a single
word from Henze about his CIA career in Turkey or anywhere else.

Henze and the Board for International Broadcasting (BIB). In May
1 980 four members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Frank
Church of Idaho, Jacob Javits of New York, Claibome Pell of Rhode Is-
land, and Charles Percy of Illinois — wrote a letter of protest to President
Jimmy Carter concerning certain proposed appointments to the Board

65. We were informed by one TV network producer that as a condition for his participa-
tion in a program Henze requires that his long association with the CIA not be mentioned.
Another network official told us that Henze. like Sterling (see note I, above), will not par-
ticipate in a program where a seriously dissenting view would be expressed. Beyond this,
he insists on control over the script, which helps explain why he is never asked embarrass-
ing or penetrating questions (see the analysis of the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour treatment
of the Bulgarian Connection in Chapter 7). The stations, networks, and printed media that
go along with these demands are committing serious acts of suppression and deception on
the public.

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THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

for International Broadcasting (BIB). The BIB was created by Congress
in 1973 to oversee the operations of the two U.S. government-operated
radio stations based in Munich, West Germany: Radio Free Europe
(RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). The BIB had been organized following
disclosures that the CIA was behind the two radio stations. The senators
complained that "former intelligence officials are trying to redirect the
board away from its oversight role to one more compatible with the two
stations' old role as a tool for propaganda."

The former CIA official within the Carter administration "trying to
redirect" the BIB was Paul Henze, described by the New York Times as
"the National Security Council specialist on United States prop-
aganda." Henze had been the policy adviser at RFE when it was con-
trolled by the CIA. The BIB controversy centered around two Henze
nominees to fill vacancies on the board. This was an effort, according to
the senators, "to make the board more responsible to the National Secu-
rity Council," i.e., to Henze. One of Henze's nominees, Leo Cheme,
reportedly received CIA money in the 1960s. The senators commented
in their letter: 6 *

We believe that the work of a decade in assuring the professional integrity of
RFE/RL would be undone if any of the present members were to be replaced by
persons who could even be remotely identified as presently or formerly as-
sociated with the CIA or intelligence activities in any capacity.

It is profoundly ironical that Henze's attempt to influence the over-
sight authority of the BIB was strongly opposed by the senators on the
ground that broadcast integrity demanded a severed relationship be-
tween news journalism and intelligence officials. In sharp contrast,
there has been no audible protest, or even minimal disclosure, as this in-
telligence figure became a leading mass media source of information on
the Bulgarian Connection.

Henze and the Media. Henze was the first prominent American to ac-
cuse the Soviets in print of conspiring to shoot Pope John Paul II. His
November 1981 article in Atlantic Community, in which he made this
charge, provided no evidence to show that the Soviets had anything to
do with the shooting. For Henze, however, the question of evidence was

66. Quoted by A. O. Sulzberger, Jr., "U.S Overseas Radio Stirs Dispute Again,"
New York Times. May 15, 1980

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

149

an unpatriotic consideration in discussing hypothetical Soviet crimes: 67

The extent to which the Soviet Union has encouraged, underwritten, and insti-
gated political destabilization is a complex and widely debated question. I be-
lieve we are past the point where it serves the interests of any party except the
Soviets to adopt the minimalist, legalistic approach which argues that if there is
no "documentary evidence" or some other form of incontrovertible proof that
the Government of the U.S.S.R. is behind something, we must assume that it is
not.

Although this article played an insignificant role in U.S. media cover-
age of the investigation into the shooting, it is important because it
openly denies the need for documentation in a case where Henze was
shortly to become a leading source of evidence for the Free World's
media. As Philip Taubman and Leslie Gelb noted in the New York Times
shortly after the arrest of Antonov: 68

Several former government officials, including Henry A. Kissinger, Secretary
of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, na-
tional security advisor to President Carter, have said that they believe that Bul-
garia and the Soviet Union were involved in the assassination attempt.

Support for this theory has come from Paul Henze, a former CIA station chief
in Turkey and an aide to Mr. Brzezinski. Mr. Henze, now a consultant to the
Rand Corporation, was hired by the Reader's Digest after the shooting of the
Pope to investigate Mr. Agca's background.

Mr. Henze's findings, which included information about links between Mr.
Agca and Bulgaria as well as the Soviet Union's use of Bulgaria as a surrogate
to spread unrest in Turkey, were incorporated in a Reader's Digest article on the
shooting of the Pope that was written by Claire Sterling and published last Sep-
tember.

Mr. Henze said he later sold his reports to NBC-News and Newsweek, which
have explored possible Bulgarian and Soviet involvement. Mr. Henze made his
research material available to the New York Times for a fee.

In brief, Henze's researches were incorporated into virtually all of the
major mass media pieces which introduced the Bulgarian Connection to
a U.S. mass audience and established the Plot's hegemonic position in
the U.S. media: Claire Sterling's article in the Reader's Digest of Sep-

67. Paul Henze, "The Long Effort (o Destabilize Turkey." Atlantic Community,
Winter 1981-1982, p. 468.

68. "U.S. Officials See A Bulgarian 'Link'," New York Times, January 27, 1983.

150

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

tember 1982; Marvin Kalb's special White Paper broadcasts in Sep-
tember 1982 and January 1983; and the Newsweek cover story of Janu-
ary 3, 1983.

Thus, Paul Henze, long-time CIA officer and specialist on prop-
aganda, who had openly denied the need for hard evidence in supporting
accusations against the Soviets, was probably the most important indi-
vidual source of information for the U.S. media in its coverage of the al-
leged Soviet-Bloc conspiracy. Furthermore, having helped generate the
Connection, Henze was then used by the media to confirm the truth of
the Plot. He was a prime mover in establishing the "echo chamber ef-
fect," whereby the originators of disinformation on the Bulgarian Con-
nection were then called upon by the mass media to verify its accuracy.

Henze and Turkey. Henze's unsuitability as a media expert on the Bul-
garian Connection is strikingly revealed in his writings on Turkey. We
discuss them briefly here because they display not only his uncritical at-
tachment to the Turkish military regime and his apologetics for state ter-
rorism — if advantageous to U .S. interests — but also his lack of self-dis-
cipline as a purported journalist or analyst. 69 Henze's basic methodolog-
ical precepts are: Anything helping my cause I will accept and
rationalize; anything hostile to it is not only wrong but is probably
Soviet disinformation. This methodology was transferred intact to his
analysis of the Bulgarian Connection.

On the quality of the Turkish martial law regime, Henze is rapturous.
Assessing the military takeover of September 12, 1980, he writes: "The
country heaved a collective sigh of relief. There was no resistance. In-
stead there was jubilation. With quarreling politicians silenced and mas-
sive arrests of terrorists, the country quickly returned to order. ' ,7 ° Note
the rhetorical "collective sigh," the implication that a lack of resistance
was a mark of general approval, and the enthusiasm for stilling quarrels
among unruly politicians (a normal characteristic of nonauthoritarian
states). In a letter to the New York Times a year and a half after the coup,
Henze said that "evidence of political oppression is hard to And in Tur-
key," and he claimed that "to a man I have found Turks enthusiastic"
about economic developments. He maintained that the new process of

69. The Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu, after recounting a series of episodes in which
Henze told plain lies, suggests that Henze is not only a bad journalist, but could hardly
even serve as a quality intelligence agent! Ugur Mumcu, Papa, Mafya, Agca (Istanbul:
Tekin Yayinevi, 1984). p. 230.

70. Paul Henze. The Plot To Kill! he Pope (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985).
p. 40.

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

151

"devising a more viable democratic system, which is now under way,
has the support of the overwhelming majority of the people. ' In the
1985 revision of The Plot To Kill the Pope, Henze makes no qualifica-
tion to his comprehensive apologetic for the martial law regime.

Henze's fondness for martial law Turkey may help us understand his
statement that "In reality fascism is no force in Italy. Communism
is." 72 We showed in Chapter 4 that fascism is an enormous force in
Italy, extensively organized within the security forces and state appa-
ratus, and involved in numerous subversive attempts at coups and ter-
rorist activities over the past several decades. We may interpret Henze's
statement that fascism is no force to be partly simple misrepresentation
of fact. But it is also a reflection of his belief that fascism is no threat.
Something is not a threat if you like it and if your country regularly
builds it up as an asset to contain other groups. The military in Turkey
was not a threat, it was an agent of stability. We would wager that
Henze did not view the military as a threat in Greece before (or after)
1967.

Nowhere in his letter or book does Henze mention torture in reference
to Turkey. He says exactly what a public relations spokesman for the
military regime would say, and when he runs into insurmountable diffi-
culties he resorts to silence or smears. 73 A report by Amnesty Interna-
tional released in July 1985 states that the torture of political detainees
in Turkey continues to be "widespread and systematic." The report
provides detailed testimony on the use of electric shocks, beating of the
soles of the feet, burning with cigarettes, hangings for long periods of
time, assaults with truncheons, and violence directed to the sexual or-
gans. 74 According to Helsinki Watch: 75

71. Letter published on February 22, 1982.

72. The Plot to Kill the Pope, p. 65.

73. In his February 22, 1982 letter to the Ne w York Times, attacking five prominent
U.S. critics of the Turkish military regime, Henze wrote: "The judgments about the cur-
rent situation in Turkey which the five professors in the social sciences express in their let-
ter are almost identical to those which Pravda prints." Thisis typical Henze (see his refer-
ences to the present authors and Mumcu in note 27. above) It results in part from the ex-
treme Manicheanism that Henze shares with Sterling, Ledeen, and their colleagues. It is
also a part of their program of deliberately tarring all opposition as part of an immense
Soviet disinformation campaign. It is. of course, very convenient to be able to dismiss any
hostile point as a product of insidious enemy propaganda.

74. Amnesty International, Turkey: Testimony on Torture (London: AI, 1985).

75. Helsinki Watch, Ten Years Later: Violations of the Helsinki Accords (New York:
Helsinki Watch, 1985), pp. 140-41.

152

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Under torture, which is used routinely during interrogation to gather informa-
tion about terrorist movements, individuals are often forced to confess any
crime and to name as many individuals as possible. In this way, thousands of
people — particularly young people — have been gathered into police stations and
military jails. Many were convicted on the basis of "confessions" obtained
through torture or upon the testimony of other tortured victims.

Ali Briand, a correspondent for Milliyet, claims that between 1980
and 1984 178,565 people were detained, 65,505 were arrested, 41,727
were condemned for political motives, 326 were sentenced to death, and
25 were executed. 1 * Henze mentions in his book that the martial law
government had arrested "43 , 1 40 terrorists and terrorist collaborators , ' '
and he notes that "during much of 1982, the national television service,
TRT-TV, broadcast almost nightly roundups of confessions and pro-
ceedings at trials of terrorists in all parts of the country." 77 Henze takes
all of this at face value — the people taken are all "terrorists," and their
confessions are all bona Tide.

Regarding Henze's claim of the overwhelming support for the more
"viable democracy" being installed by the military government, it is
notable that when the opportunity arrived for the Turkish people to pass
judgment on the military government in the 1983 parliamentary elec-
tions, the party supported by the military finished last. Referring to the
1983 Turkish election, Helsinki Watch reported: "The Turkish people
overwhelmingly rejected the military-backed party and gave their sup-
port to the Motherland Party, which in the absence of any real opposi-
tion, was the only alternative to the junta." Before permitting elections
to occur in the first place, the military regime had forbidden all previ-
ously established political parties and politicians from participating in
the election: 12 of the 15 political parties that sought to participate were
banned. This arrangement assured that the winning party or coalition
would be acceptable to the generals and would be prepared to abide by
the rules that they had already built into Turkey's now "viable demo-
cratic" system.

The generals also rigged the election by institutionalizing their power
through a new constitution, which legalized the extension of martial law
in many provinces and guaranteed the continued presidency of General
Kenan Evren until at least 1989. The military was to be the real behind-
the-scenes government that defined the rules of the political game. Part

76 Ibid., p. 138.

77 Henze, op. tit., n 70, pp. 62-63.

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

153

of these rules were the 631 laws it had enacted following the 1980
takeover, which could not be changed or criticized by the new Turkish
parliament. On January 28, 1984, the Washington Post reported the
consequences of the new constitution and press laws:

Bound by these limits, the OzaJ government is seen by many observers here as
no more than a token step in the direction of democratic civilian rule, with little
chance of exercising more than a moral influence on Evren and the determined
officers who joined him in the military coup of 1980.

As noted, Henze cites without qualms or qualifications the evidence
of Turkish prisoners who "confess." Similarly, if the Turkish military
government claims that its arrests and censorship of writers and jour-
nalists are based on the latter's support of "terrorism," Henze raises no
questions. He also takes the government's announced discoveries of
weapons caches at face value, using them to implicate the accused or-
ganizations in terror and subversion: "Most of them [the weapons] were
discovered in hideouts in former 'liberated areas' in premises of organi-
zations such as TOBDER [a teachers' union], DISK [a major trade
union organization], and groups associated with the National [sic] Ac-
tion Party." 78 Helsinki Watch points out that these claims of discoveries
of weapons caches, which are used as the basis for fresh waves of ar-
rests, are never verified by independent investigation. Henze never ad-
dresses the question of the validity of the government pronouncements
or their possible use as disinformation and propaganda. Given the fact
that Henze is a long-time professional propagandist, this uncritical use
of contaminated materials must be a conscious act, and one serving a
propaganda function.

Just as everything the Turkish military government says is taken as
true, the other side of the coin is Henze 's reliance on assertion without
evidence to castigate the Enemy. A central feature of Henze 's writings
is his claim that in the 1970s Turkey was the victim of a comprehensive
Soviet plan for destabilization through terrorism. He asserts that ' 'The
Soviet modus operandi included multi-faceted infiltration and build-up
of rightist groups to serve as a foil for the left and accelerate the de-
stabilization process." 1 ' He cites no independent evidence to support

78 Ibid., p 6 1 . Ugur Mumcu stales that Henze's comments on TOBDER and DISK as
terrorist organizations "are based on straightforward lies. " Mumcu, op. cii.. n. 69, p.
230

79 Henze. op. cil . n 70, pp. 63-64

154

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

these claims, nor does he explain how the alleged Soviet plan would
serve Soviet interests. Proof that the Soviets provided arms is that
"there is no other logical source," 80 whatever the trademark of weapons
manufacture. There are other "logical" sources, but Henze does not
discuss them. By what logic would the Soviet Union support right-
wingers as a "foil" for destabilization, when strengthening the Right
would shift the balance of power toward an adverse result — a
crackdown by the rightwing and pro-NATO military — which did in fact
occur? Henze never bothers to explain. The fact is that the real benefi-
ciary of the decade of terrorism was not the Soviet Union, but rather the
United States, as Henze himself acknowledges — "Turkey's relations
with her NATO allies were probably, on balance, strengthened rather
than weakened by terrorism" — without awareness of his internal con-
tradictions."

Given the results of the decade of terrorism, the question arises
whether it might have been the beneficiary — the United States — who
sponsored terrorism. Henze never mentions U.S. intervention and de-
stabilization efforts in Turkey. As we discussed in Chapter 3, however,
U.S. intervention in that country was massive and its links to terror
groups clearer than any Soviet connections. Henze is perhaps con-
strained in discussing these U.S. activities, not only from his political
commitments, but also because he was an actor in the events of the ter-
ror years. In the spring of 1985, former Turkish Prime Minister Bulent
Ecevit was quoted in the Italian weekly Panorama as saying that he was
certain that Henze, as the CIA station chief in Turkey in the 1970s, was
a behind-the-scenes organizer of rightwing violence and massacres in
those years. " ! The United Stales had been upset with Ecevit, who pur-
sued a policy of detente with the Soviet Union and closed the U.S. mili-
tary bases in 1975 after the U.S. arms embargo following the Turkish
invasion of Cyprus. The U.S. "loss" of Iran in 1978-79 greatly in-
creased the strategic importance of Turkey and its facilities. Turkey's
reliability as a military partner and host to key U.S. surveillance posts
was only reestablished following the outbreak of terrorism that led in
turn to the military coup of 1980. This pattern of alleged Soviet-spon-
sored terrorism, with the United States consistently reaping valuable
gains in consequence of these foolish Soviet acts, recurs in the Bulgar-
ian Connection. Henze, of course, never addresses this paradox.

80 Ibid., p. fi2

81. Ibid., pp. 51-52

82 Panorama, May 26. 1985. p 107

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

155

Henze on the Bulgarian Connection. Henze has devoted considerable
energy to proving that Agca is neither unbalanced nor a fascist, as this is
important for making him a credible witness. Given Agca's courtroom
performance and repeated claims to be Jesus Christ, it is useful to have
Henze's assurance that "He [Agca] was too rational, too proud to be
able to make himself appear deranged." 83 In his proof of Agca's lack of
political commitment, Henze cites a neutral statement by Agca's brother
Adnan, but suppresses Adnan's highly political explanation reported in
Newsweek, that Agca wanted to kill the Pope "because of his conviction
that the Christians have imperialist designs against the Muslim world
and are doing injustices to the Islamic countries."" 4 Although Agca
spent the better part of his life with Gray Wolves, this has no evidentiary
value for Henze. Agca's friends like Gray Wolves militant Oral Celik
are only "allegedly" rightists, who were "claimed to have been" close
f riends of Agca's ."' Henze's standards of proof here are greatly different
from those required to demonstrate Agca's alleged Bulgarian links.

Henze attributes all of the voluminous evidence tying Agca to the
Turkish Right to Soviet disinformation. For example, after the Ipekci
murder Agca was arrested at the Marmora cafe, a Gray Wolves hang-
out. Henze says: "It was almost as if the arrest had been staged to sub-
stantiate the impression that Ipekci had been killed by the extreme right,
at the connivance of Alparslan Tiirkes. " 86 This is a wonderful illustra-
tion of terrorism pseudoscience, which allows its user to make a point
by purely verbal manipulation. Note the "almost as if," which is gib-
berish, but which allows Henze to suggest that the arrest at the cafe was
arranged by the Reds to give the impression that the Right was involved
in the Ipekci shooting. There is, of course, no evidence I or this, and it is
absurd in that Agca was well-known in Turkey as a rightist without hav-
ing to be arrested at the Marmora. (Henze uses this bit of pseudoscience
to influence an American audience, not one in Turkey.) The technique
used here is to attribute a "cover" in any situation in which we want a
role reversal. As another illustration, Henze says that Agca's connec-
tions with Celebi in Frankfurt, West Germany, "which on the surface
appeared rightwing," were in fact a rightwing cover for Red control." 7
No evidence is provided that the surface was not the reality. Further-

83. Henze, op. cit., n 70, p 7. See also p. 41

84. Newsweek, May 25. 1981

85 Henze, op. cil., n. 70, p 147

86. Ibid., p. 148.

87. Ibid., p. 160

156

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

more, within a week after the shooting of the Pope in Rome, Celebi
called a press conference to announce that while Agca's attack might
create the appearance of Gray Wolves involvement, in fact the Bulgar-
ians and KGB were behind the assassination attempt. Henze does not
mention Celebi 's press conference, but his and Sterling's methodology
can cope with it (or anything else). 88

Henze's method is also illuminated by his analysis of the 1979 threat
by Agca to kill the Pope in Turkey. He tells us that Agca's letter
threatening the Pope was very probably written under Bulgarian instruc-
tions and was "his first open move toward implementing a plan that
could have been developing for nearly a year. ' "* Henze offers no evi-
dence for this scenario; it is entirely hypothetical. The fine-tuning by the
KGB was remarkable: They supposedly anticipated the Solidarity crisis
by hiring Agca well in advance and got him to make threats as a cover
several years before the actual assassination attempt. Still more remark-
able, the KGB organized the right wing press to denounce the Pope's
visit, to give the further impression that the Turkish Right was hostile to
the Pope and the things he stands for. 90 Why, with all this fine-tuning,
the KGB then sent Agca for a long, visible stay in Sofia, and used a
legion of Bulgarian employees to help Agca in Rome, is a puzzle.
Henze's position is that the KGB got careless after its numerous "suc-
cesses" in Italy, but he never explains the contrast between the careful
planning in Turkey and the foolishness elsewhere.

Although the key to demonstrating a Bulgarian Connection is pre-
sumably to be found in Agca's supposed links with the three Bulgarians
charged with conspiracy to shoot the Pope, only four and a half pages of
Henze's 217-page book are devoted to developing an actual Agca-Bul-
garian link — two pages for the "Bulgarian Connection in Rome" and
two and a half pages for "Bulgarian Big Brothers." Henze's first at-
tempt to link Agca directly with the Bulgarians proceeds as follows: 9 '

Agca made his way back to Rome. There he was no longer on his own but in

88 They would cope wi(h it as follows: Celebi was using a double deception in which,
while on the surface this rightist denied involvement and blamed the KGB, in reality he
did this because he knew he would be disbelieved By blaming the KGB he helped exon-
erate it!

89. Henze, op cil , n. 70, pp. 204-05.

90 Henze denies that the rightwing press was hostile to the Pope's visit. Ugur Mumcu,
however, gives numerous citations from the rightwing Turkish press of the time to demon-
strate that Henze was telling another whopper. Mumcu. op. cil., n. 69, pp. 213-20.

91 Henze, op. cil.. n 70. p. 171

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

157

direct contact with Bulgarian intelligence officials. According to his statements
to the Italian authorities in the summer of 1982, Agca met with these Bulgarians
at the Hotel Archimede in early January 1981 to discuss the assassination of
Lech Walesa. The talk was of blowing up his car it seems.

As there has never been anything in the way of evidence or eyewit-
nesses linking Agca to Bulgarians, Henze relies entirely on Agca's own
story. Agca eventually withdrew his claims that a plan to assassinate
Walesa had materialized, or that a meeting at the Hotel Archimede ever
took place, and he recanted on other major contentions that had been
used to confirm his links to Bulgarians. The 1985 edition of Henze's
book never mentions these retractions.

Following the meeting in which the Agca-Bulgarian team supposedly
planned to assassinate Walesa, "The Bulgarians must have continued
frequent contacts with him.'" 2 No evidence is presented to sustain this
assertion. Henze goes on to further fancies: 9 '

The Bulgarians there [in Rome] were neither the architects nor the prime con-
tractors for Agca's activities. They were journeymen with the task of seeing that
plans drawn up and approved elsewhere were executed efficiently. Control rest-
ed in Sofia or Moscow. The architects remained in Moscow. They were press-
ing the men in Rome to get on with the job. Something had to be done about this
Polish pope.

He writes that the "architects remained in Moscow" with the same
assurance that "the Bulgarians must have continued frequent contact
with Agca," although there is no evidence for either and the underlying
premise rests only on Agca's word. As with Sterling, a secret of
Henze's persuasiveness for the media is the breezy confidence with
which he presents his alleged facts and conclusions and glides over his
omissions and contradictions.

Boris Henzoff: KGB Propaganda Specialist. One of the most remarka-
ble features of the history of the Bulgarian Connection has been the abil-
ity of Henze to assume a dominant position as news analyst and report-
er, given his badly compromised credentials. Henze's bias, and the
media's culpability in not recognizing and acknowledging this bias,
may be made clearer by constructing an experiment.

92 Ibid., p. 172
93. Ibid.

158

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Let us imagine that there was a Soviet KGB officer with the following
characteristics:

He had been the KGB station chief in the country from which the
would-be assassin came, one where the Soviet-backed regime routinely
tortured its own citizens;

He had at one time been the policy adviser for a European radio sta-
tion that the Soviets now admit was a KGB operation to spread the
Soviet version of the news throughout Western Europe;

He had recently nominated known intelligence experts and suspected
KGB agents to oversee this same radio station; and

His most recent assignment within the Soviet apparatus was the post
of propaganda specialist in the Politburo.

Let us now imagine that this same KGB officer undertakes a prop-
aganda task, allegedly "on his own," at the precise moment that the
Soviet Union is about to deploy an increased number of nuclear missiles
on European soil. The new missiles are opposed by many Europeans,
including substantial numbers of citizens in countries allied with the
Soviet Union. The "former" KGB officer's endeavor — as the Kremlin
is dramatizing the U.S. threat to the Soviet Union and manipulating in-
formation about the military balance in Europe — is to orchestrate a be-
hind-the-scenes media campaign to persuade international opinion that
the highest leaders of the United States government have conspired to
shoot the Pope.

While the KGB officer's campaign finds a ready acceptance in the
Soviet press and in communist party publications throughout the world,
it must be admitted that his story raises doubts in other quarters. But
even though he can provide no real evidence — no "smoking gun" or
eyewitness testimony — that demonstrates that the papal assassination at-
tempt was a U.S. plot, he argues that a "minimalist, legalistic ap-
proach" to the U.S. conspiracy "would only serve the interests of the
Americans." This reminder about patriotic duty apparently convinces
Pravda and Izvestia, which print the front-page news that the United
States has conspired to shoot the Pope.

As the story gains in credibility with each retelling, new confessions
by the would-be assassin issue from his Bulgarian prison. These are
confirmed by the Bulgarian investigators. The KGB officer is called
upon by the "quality" Soviet media to comment on these startling reve-
lations. In fact, the KGB officer becomes a prime source for the com-
munist media throughout the world. The communist media pay no atten-
tion to protests from the West about the credibility of their source, for

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

159

they quickly trace these protests and alleged contrary evidence to the
CIA. And why should they take the western allegations of fraud seri-
ously? For the KGB man is a former intelligence officer of their own
country; and, as for each country in the world, it is an article of faith that
only intelligence officers of somebody else's state tell lies.

Michael Ledeen

Like Sterling and Henze, Michael Ledeen has had a long career of ser-
vice to the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and durable links to the
establishment's conservative network. In his 1980 efforts on behalf of
Reagan, Ledeen co-authored a series of articles with Amaud de Bor-
chgrave, and Ledeen 's recent book Grave New World ** was enthusias-
tically reviewed in de Borchgrave's (and the Reverend Moon's)
Washington Times. In his acknowledgments in Grave New World, Le-
deen expresses in groveling language his indebtedness to a large number
of the key members of the rightwing network, from Henry Kissinger to
Vemon Walters ("one of the great personages of our time, whose tire-
less service and remarkable personal qualities have done so much for
our country").

An important institutional base of Ledeen has been the Georgetown
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a research center
"affiliated with" Georgetown University. (Although no courses are
taught there, this affiliation furnishes an academic cover for a rightwing
propaganda agency/thinktank.) Funded by conservative foundations and
corporate interests, CSIS provides a revolving door between govem-
ment-CIA personnel and journalist-academics. Former CIA Deputy Di-
rector for Intelligence Ray Cline has been a leading official of the Cen-
ter, and the senior researchers tend to be former intelligence officials of
the CIA and State Department. The CSIS has specialized in reports on
various forms of the Red Threat. Fred Landis makes a good case that it
also provides an outlet for CIA and other intelligence reports and a
cover for CIA black propaganda." Perhaps most important, the CSIS
provides a means for organizing the preparation and dissemination of

94. Michael Leeden, Grave New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

95. Fred Landis, "Georgetown's Ivory Tower for Old Spooks," Inquiry, September
30, 1979, pp. 7-9; Landis, "The Best Selling Lies of 1980," Inquiry, September 29,
1980, pp. 17-23.

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the appropriate conservative "lines" on various subjects, and for pro-
viding "experts" like Michael Ledeen, Robert Kupperman, and Walter
Laqueur to appear on the TV networks to expound these views. The in-
tellectual status of the organization is enhanced by the affiliation of
scholar-notables like Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Adjunct Fellow Amaud
de Borchgrave.

Ledeen's role within the rightwing intellectual establishment has been
based on his credentials as an expert on Italy, and especially on political
extremism and "Soviet-sponsored terrorism" in Italy. As Italy has pro-
vided a dramatic example of these phenomena for conservatives, Le-
deen has become a leading spokesperson for the thesis of Soviet ma-
nipulation and disinformation. 96

In Italy in the mid-1970s Ledeen served as a journalist for the right-
wing paper // Giornale Nuovo, a 1974 breakaway from Corriere Delia
Sera, and probably funded by the CIA. 1 " During the Italian election
campaign of 1976, the Italian Communist Party was expected to make
great gains, which aroused acute alarm in the U.S. foreign policy estab-
lishment. In these dire circumstances Ledeen played an important role
in trumpeting both at home and in Italy itself the fearsomeness of the
Red Threat. In collaborative articles with Claire Sterling, Ledeen al-
leged that Soviet money was flowing into Italian politics. (Characteristi-
cally, and once again revealing a feature of Sterling and Ledeen as dis-
informationists, this was a period of enormous secret inflows of U.S.
money into the Italian electoral process.''*)

While Ledeen has close links to the U.S. hard-line Right, perhaps his
most notable distinction lies in his affiliations with the extreme Right in
Italy. As we saw in Chapter 4, he was associated with Francesco
Pazienza, a friend of Licio Gelli and the Mafia and a member of the Ital-
ian secret service organization SISMI, and Ledeen himself was on the
SISMI payroll and participated in its dirty tricks. According to Italian
press reports, furthermore, Pazienza and Ledeen foisted some stale U.S.
intelligence reports about the Communist Plot on SISMI for large con-
sulting fees. Ledeen's manipulative operations in Italy were of suffi-
cient scale and quality to cause a new head of SISMI to denounce Le-
deen on the floor of the Italian Parliament in 1984 as an "intriguer" and

96. With the cooperation of the mass media, in which they are a powerful force, the
conservatives have succeeded in pushing under the rug the massive rightwing destabiliza-
tion and terrorism in Italy in the period 1969-80. They pretend that Italian terrorism is pre-
dominantly a product of the Left (See Chapter 4 )

97, See Landis, "The Best Selling Lies of 1980," op. cit.. n 95
98 See Chapter 4, p. 73

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

161

unwelcome in Italy.*'

It even appears that Ledeen had a significant relationship with Licio
Gelli, the head of P-2 now wanted in Italy for a variety of crimes. On
March 29, 1982, the Italian weekly Panorama reported that a phone call
from Gelli in Uruguay to Florentine lawyer Federico Federici, which
was intercepted by the police, had instructed Federici to pass the manu-
script of Gelli 's new book on to Michael Ledeen. When Gelli 's files
were seized by the Uruguayan police, Michael Ledeen went down to
Uruguay on behalf of the U.S. State Department to try to acquire some
of the files. 100 One can only wonder what Michael Ledeen was looking
for in those files!

Ledeen' s disinformation role. Michael Ledeen 's function as an intellec-
tual-propagandist of the hard-line Right is to find plausible reasons to
oppose detente and to justify a renewed arms race, the free use of force,
and support for the enlarging network of rightist regimes and counter-
revolutionary Freedom Fighters. His objective is to move the frontier of
accepted premises as far to the right as is at present feasible. In the sum-
mer of 1985, for example, Ledeen aggressively pushed the desirability
of bombing the Lebanese Shiites in retaliation for the TWA-hostage in-
cident, as part of a harder-line policy of force in dealing with the taking
of hostages; 10 ' and during the same period he urged the higher morality
of invading Nicaragua in the interest of Freedom.' 02

The themes addressed over the years by Ledeen in pursuit of this
basic agenda are very similar to those pressed by Sterling, Henze, de
Borchgrave, Brzezinski, Robert Moss, and Henry Kissinger. The Com-
munists are gaining power, pursuing their fixed agenda of conquest, in-
filtrating everywhere, and posing ever more serious threats to Liberty.
The Free World's defenses are down and sagging. The First Amend-
ment is an encumbrance that allows the liberal-dominated media to play
into the enemy's hands. We need to organize and behave more
ruthlessly to contend with the forces of Evil. This means providing more
consistent support to our allies (e.g., the late Somoza, the late Shah,
Pinochet, Botha, and Marcos) and being more willing to move militarily

99 Maurizio De Luca, "Fuori I'intrigante," L'Espresso, August 5, 1984

100 Diana Johnstone, "The Ledeen connections," In These Times, September 8-14.
1982.

101. "Be Ready to Fight." New York Time*. June 23, 1985 (Op-Ed column)

102. "When Security Preempts the Rule of Law," New York Times, April 16, 1984
(Op-Ed column)

162

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

against the forces of the enemy (Angola, Nicaragua, the Shiite Mos-
lems).

Ledeen's role in developing and propagating the Bulgarian Connec-
tion was thus only one of many threads of conservative thought he has
been pursuing. What unites these threads is Ledeen's determination to
show the Soviet hand everywhere. This can be seen by examining his
recent volume of essays, Grave New World. Our examination will il-
luminate the place of the Bulgarian Connection within a family of right-
wing themes, and it will reveal more clearly the pseudoscientific quality
of the entire body of thought of Ledeen and his f ellow disinformationists
centered in the CSIS.

Soviet military superiority. Ledeen consistently acts as if certain partly
or fully institutionalized propaganda lies are true, and proceeds from
there. For example, a premise of the rightwing establishment is that the
Soviet Union achieved military superiority in the late 1970s. Ledeen
presents this as an assured truth, without bothering to provide argument
or citations: "This [earlier Soviet] inferiority has now been overcome,
and insofar as one side now has an overall edge in military power, it is
the Warsaw Pact that leads the NATO countries. " 103 This statement can
be refuted by reference to numerous U.S. Defense Department esti-
mates and posture statements. NATO defense expenditures have always
exceeded those of the Warsaw Pact countries, its naval fire power is
twice that of the Warsaw Pact countries, it has comparable levels of mil-
itary manpower, and it has numerical and technical superiority in nucle-
ar weapons. In a significant exchange on May 11, 1982, Senator Carl
Levin asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs if he would trade Soviet
military capabilities for our own. General Vesey would not trade. On
April 29, 1982, Senator Charles Percy asked Def ense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger whether he would trade nuclear arsenals with the Soviets.
Weinberger said that "I would not for a moment exchange anything, be-
cause we have an immense edge in technology . " 104 Part of the genius of
the system is that military officials can acknowledge our military
superiority and plans for destabilization of the Soviet Bloc based on in-
creases in military advantage, 105 while maintaining for the general pub-

103 Ledeen, op. cit , n 94, p. 5.

1 04. These quotes and a full range o f statistics are available i n Center for Defense Infor-
mation, "U.S. -Soviet Military Facts," The Defense Monitor, Vol. XIII. No. 6, 1984

105. See Chapter 4, n. 7 and associated text

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

163

lie Che vision of Soviet superiority and menace. This requires the ser-
vices of intellectuals like Michael Ledeen.

The Soviet terror network. Another established premise of the disinfor-
mationists is that there is a Soviet-supported terror network. This idea
therefore enters Ledeen 's writings as a truth not requiring evidence.
"The terror network was (among other things) a way of intensifying the
pressure on the West to make space for the extreme Left." 106 As we
noted earlier, the overall effect of the activities of the "terrorists" in
Italy, Turkey, and West Germany has served western interests, not
those of the Soviet Union. The Soviets have never been keen on the
"extreme Left." And their stress on detente and building economic re-
lationships with the West runs counter to building a Terror Network.
Ledeen never discusses these points.

The Korean airliner 007 as a case study in Soviet terrorism. An exam-
ple of Soviet terrorism in action, according to Ledeen, was the shooting
down of Korean airliner K AL 007 in September 1 983 . This incident was
quickly capitalized on by the Reagan administration, which alleged that
the Soviets had knowingly shot down a civilian airliner without warn-
ing. The extreme Right contended that this was a Soviet bullying act, or
even one designed explicitly to eliminate rightwing Congressman Larry
McDonald, a passenger. Ledeen accepts and builds on the propaganda
line and the Soviet coercion theme, using it to try to portray the then
Soviet Premier Andropov as a villainous bully. According to Ledeen,
the shooting down of the airliner was a "show of force . . . brutally
threatening those who did not behave as he [Andropov] wanted. " 101 The
incident was actually a disaster for the Soviet Union, which shot down
the plane not knowing that it was a civilian aircraft, 101 and then stumbled
badly in confusion before a well-organized Reagan administration prop-
aganda onslaught. That it was a planned effort to bully the West is the
effusion of a propagandist.

The Grenada Threat. The Grenadian revolution of 1979, according to Le-

106. Ltd »en, op. cit., n. 94, p. 196.

107. Ibid., pp. 192-95.

108. This point was even belatedly conceded by the CIA, but this did not diminish the
effectiveness of the propaganda campaign See David Shribman, "U S Experts Say
Soviet Didn't See Jel Was Civilian," New York Times. October 7. 1983.

164

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

deen, established an important Soviet outpost, and was part of "a
major direct [Soviet] commitment in the Caribbean." 10 * Of course, this
was all by proxy, but the Soviet commitment to the Grenadians was
"quite explicit when Marshall [sic] Ogarkov told the ranking officer of
the Grenadian army. Major Einstein Louison, that the revolution in Gre-
nada was irreversible, thus extending the Brezhnev doctrine to the
Caribbean region. ""° But why should the Soviets operate carefully only
through proxies if they were willing to make an "explicit" extension of
the Brezhnev doctrine to the Caribbean? Ledeen provides no direct quo-
tation from Ogarkov. It is obvious that if Ogarkov had made a Soviet
promise that they would not permit a reversal of the revolution, Ledeen
would have mentioned this. As it is, he is forced to transform what was
probably a rhetorical flourish at a cocktail party into a Soviet commit-
ment. Here propaganda trickery attains the comic.

The Reaganite history of El Salvador. Ledeen's rewriting of Salvadoran
history is in the same mold as his treatment of the 007 incident. That is,
he knows that the Reagan administration was successful in selling the
1982 and 1984 Salvadoran elections as marvels of the democratic pro-
cess. He therefore feels able to take their integrity at face value and go
on from there. His manipulation of evidence also illustrates the larger
disinformation function of turning all popular movements against Un-
supported dictatorships into minority attacks on reformist governments.
According to Ledeen: 1 "

A group of progressive generals had seized power in 1 979 from an oligarchic
group that had long ruled the country. This coup constituted a moderate revolu-
tion: Some thirty thousand of the old ruling class left El Salvador. ... In 1 980,
the generals brought Napoledn Duarte in to head the government, and Duarte
and his colleagues promised constitutional reform, democratic elections, and a
continuation of the redistribution program. All of these promises were main-
tained [sic] — an achievement in itself. It was only after this progressive coup
that a unified guerrilla movement came into being. . . .

We may note the following f abrications and misrepresentations in this
account:

( 1 ) The economic oligarchy had ruled the country in close collusion

109. Led»en. op. cit , n 94, p. 195.

1 10. Ibid., p. 196.
Ill Ibid., pp. 97-98

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

165

with a military oligarchy. The 1979 coup was engineered by progressive
junior officers, not generals. These progressive officers were quickly
ousted in a countercoup that left power in the hands of the same military
elements that had collaborated with the old economic oligarchy for de-
cades. As noted by Raymond Bonner:" 2

The young, progressive officers who carefully plotted the coup lost control of it
as swiftly as they had executed it. Their ideals and objectives were subverted by
senior, more conservative officers who had the backing of Devine [U. S. Am-
bassador to El Salvador] and the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador and key Carter
administration officials in Washington. These senior officers were not about to
surrender their unfettered sovereignty to civilians. They recoiled at the prospect
of having criminal charges lodged against any of their colleagues. They blocked
the implementation of economic reforms. And they continued to use excessive
force against dissent: More people were killed in the three weeks f ollowing the
coup than in any three-week period during the Romero regime [the dictatorship
which preceded the coup].

(2) Duarte was brought into the junta in March 1980 after the resigna-
tion of the progressive elements in the junta. His function was to serve
as a figleaf for the escalating violence, in the course of which over
20,000 unarmed civilians were killed by the security forces in 1980-81
without audible protest from Duarte. He was elevated to President of the
junta in December 1980, following the rape-murder of four U.S. reli-
gious women, an action by the security forces that required a public re-
lations response. Duarte himself conceded just prior to the 1982 elec-
tions that he had lacked any real power and served as a figurehead." 3

(3) Ledeen suppresses the fact that a state of siege was imposed in
March 1980, from which ensued a level of state terror that far exceeded
the violence of the preceding Romero dictatorship. This was the period
in which the "death squads" became important factors in Salvadoran
life.

(4) The promise of "constitutional reform" was nullified im-
mediately after the progressive junior officers and civilians were ousted.
Instead of a constitutional process a new reign of terror descended on El
Salvador. Even William Doherty, head of the CIA-funded American In-

112. Weakness and Deceit: U S. Policy and El Salvador (New York: Times Books,
1984), p. 149.

113. See the interview with Duarte by Raymond Bonner, New York Times, March 1 ,
1982.

166

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

stitute for Free Labor Development, stated in 1982 that "there was no
system of justice in El Salvador. " IN

(5) The Salvadoran guerrilla movement came into existence in the
early 1970s. It gained strength as popular movements of peasants,
workers, and professionals were brutally repressed, and as the electoral
path to reform was closed. It then grew rapidly under the reign of terror
that followed the countercoup in early 1980.

Ledeen on the media. One function of the disinformationists is to make
the media more pliable in accepting without question their disinforma-
tion handouts. As we have noted, one way they do this is to trumpet
loudly about Soviet disinformation, as part of the larger campaign of
bullying the media into submission to their own. Ledeen's attack on the
media fits the standard neoconservative format.

(1) The media are a separate "largely homogeneous political class
with the usual overriding class interest: increasing their own power."" 5
The neoconservatives pretend that the lower echelons of journalists-pro-
ducers are all there are in the media. But the media are a very complex
set that includes reporters, anchorpersons, producers, owners, pub-
lishers, and corporate parents. The large media are all sizable corpora-
tions or affiliates of very large companies, and the bulk of their revenue
is derived from the advertising outlays of other large companies. The
media are owned and controlled by powerful corporate interests and
wealthy individuals. What is their "class" and class interest? Why
would they be opposed to a foreign policy geared to the interests of their
corporate confreres? Do these owners, managers, and publishers have
no influence over their employees' activities? Would these owners stand
by helplessly in the face of systematic attacks on the corporate system
and the essentials of national foreign policy agreed upon by the corpo-
rate community? Ledeen, of course, never addresses these questions." 6

(2) The media culture is liberal and represents a liberal conformity.
"Theirs is a view of the world in which the United States is a major
problem, not a major contributor to solutions."" 7 Interestingly, Ledeen
and his neoconservative allies never ask whether the liberals are an-

I 14. Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives. Hearings on Presiden-
tial Certification on El Salvador, 97th Congress, 2nd Session, 1982, vol. 2, p. 105
115. Ledeen, op. cit., n. 94, p. 108.

1 16 See generally, Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media
(New York: St Martin s Press. 1986). especially Chapters 2. 3, and 4

117 Ledeen, op. cit., n. 94. p. 107

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

167

ticommunist and whether they consider the Soviet Union to be a source
of problems or a major contributor to solutions. The answers to the latter
questions are so blatantly obvious that the neoconservatives have to
evade them entirely. The trouble with the liberals is that, while usually
highly patriotic and very hostile to communism, many of them actually
believe in the principles of political democracy and competitive enter-
prise. Thus, they will sometimes criticize radical deviations from these
principles on the part of Free World governments. It is this margin of
dissent that the neoconservatives can't stand; they want a full mobiliza-
tion of propaganda resources, in the interest of National Security!

The statement by Ledeen quoted above is of course wildly inaccurate.
The press in the United States occasionally portrays its own country as
having erred, but it invariably ascribes these errors to miscalculation in
the national desire to do good. For the Free World media, U.S. inter-
ventions or violations of international law are deviations from a general
tendency to do good in the world. By contrast, the press almost uni-
formly regards the Soviet Union and its allies as sources of problems,
not means of their solution.

(3) "Most journalists these days consider it beneath their dignity to
simply report the words of government officials — and let it go at
that."" 8 This is a fine illustration of Ledeen's (and the general neocon-
servative) view that the media should properly serve as an uncritical
conduit for government handouts. Some might argue that Big Govern-
ment threatens to dominate the media and gradually to become Big
Brother. The neoconservatives have little fear of this, as long as their
pals are in charge of the government! Big government is bad only in its
intrusions into the economy, and even there, only where it tries to curb
business excesses and redistribute income downward. In short, Ledeen
is a spokesman for a National Security State and unbridled corporate
domination of the economy.

(4) "The United States and its allies are held up against standards that
are not applied to the Soviet Union and its allies. Relatively minor
human rights transgressions in a friendly country (especially if ruled by
an authoritarian government of the Right) are given far more attention
and more intense criticism than far graver sins of countries hostile to
us.""'' This is one of those neoconservative and Ledeenean whoppers
that astound by their sheer audacity. Abuses of peasants and trade un-

I 18. Ibid., p. III.
1 19. Ibid., p 131.

168

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ionists in Guatemala and Turkey are given more attention in the U.S.
media than abuses in Poland? The murders of human rights activists in
El Salvador are given more publicity than the treatment of Sakharov,
Orlov, and Shcharansky in the Soviet Union? The media have paid a lot
of attention to human rights violations in Indonesia and mass murder by
the Indonesian government in East Timor, while neglecting Pol Pot and
the trials and tribulations of the Vietnamese boat people?

Ledeen demonstrates the media's "ideological double standard" by
comparing "the relative authority given statements from western and
non-westem sources." 1 - 0 He illustrates by the fact that "a denial by
Qaddafi leads 'CBS News' to speak of alleged' Libyan involvement in
Chad (after all, it was only alleged by the American government, and
thus it was somehow suspect). . . . " 121 As Ledeen gives neither date
nor source for this quotation, it is not clear whether the use of the word
"alleged" accompanied Qaddafi's denial, but the implication that Qad-
dafi is treated with deference in the U S. media as an authority superior
to U.S. government officials is grotesque nonsense. The fact that Qad-
dafi was given a few minutes of time on CBS News proves nothing
about how he was used — which is usually as a straw man to knock
down. The main point, however, is that Qaddafi is the long-established
bogeyman of both administration and press. Any negative allegation
about Qaddafi is publishable, and his credibility as a source is abso-
lutely nil. Ledeen's suggestion to the contrary, based on the application
of a single word, is silly even for a propagandist.

(5) "Perhaps the greatest success of Soviet disinformation is the con-
stant cynicism about American motives that characterizes so much of
contemporary journalism."'" The assertion of media cynicism about
American motives is nonsensical, and the reverse of the truth. The
standard liberal formal is to postulate beneficent motives which are re-
grettably not being implemented properly. No matter how many Latin
American dictatorships are brought into being and loyally supported by
American power, the mass media never fail to find its country pursuing
democracy and other reasonable ends.

Ledeen also uses here the standard disinformationist technique for
smearing the media spelled out in The Spike. 125 Note how he makes the

120 Ibid .p. 132

121 Ibid., pp 132-33.

122 Ibid., p. 134.

123. Robert Moss and Amaud de Borchgrave, The Spike (New York: Crown, 1980)
The authors argue that a substantial sector of the "establishment" media is deeply pene-

SIX: THE DISINFORMAT10NISTS

169

cynicism a success of Soviet disinformation, suggesting a cause and ef-
fect relation. He provides not one jot of evidence that any domestic criti-
cism of U.S. policies is based on Soviet sources. He just implies this by
word manipulation. He actually goes on to explain that it must be Soviet
influence that causes suspicion of motives because the United States is
good, and when forced into conflict "will strain to support democratic
forces" — as it has done for so many years in Guatemala and Zaire, for
example. Although Ledeen is supposed to be a political scientist, he of-
fers no serious discussion of U.S. interest and policies, only propaganda
cliches.'"

(6) Ledeen is deeply bothered by the First Amendment, especially in
its claims for "unlimited free speech" and its lack of requirement for
"responsible use of that right ." 126 He sees this claim as the slogan of the
"new class" that dominates the media and as a weapon in a "class
struggle." We have to do something about the First Amendment in
order to ensure serious debate, because you can't have serious debate
when one side {i.e., the media) "is itself an interested party." 1 " The
notion of the media as a "class interest" in systematic opposition to the
government is pure neoconservative ideology and indefensible, as dis-
cussed in points ( 1 ) and (2) above. It is interesting to note, however, Le-
deen 's complaisance in the face of centralizing government power. Lib-
erals ask: Isn't the government very powerful and doesn't it pose the
problem of manipulating consent and overwhelming the public in a cen-
tralizing system? If the media is more "responsible" in a Ledeenean
sense (i.e., serves as a conduit for State Department handouts), where
will we find any debate at all? Ledeen is silent on these points

Ledeen does end up on a constructive note, however. He would pro-
vide for easier libel suits, an ombudsman, and more competition (how,
he does not say). His positive recommendations, in short, are dangerous
(libel suits), vague (more competition), and trivial (an ombudsman).

(rated by KGB moles and well-populated with KGB dupes.

1 24 In an Op-Ed column in the New York Times. Ledeen even refers to our respect for
law as "innate " Ledeen, op. tit., n. 102.

125. On the history of the U.S. struggle against democracy in Guatemala, see espe-
cially, Blanche Wiesen Cook. The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: Doubleday,
1981); Richard lmmerman. The CIA in Guatemala (Austin, Texas: University of Texas
Press, 1982); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit (New York: Double-
day, 1981) On the U S role in Zaire, see Jonathan Kwitny. Endless Enemies (New York:
Congdon & Weed, 1984), pp 8-103.

126 Ledeen, op cit., n. 94, p 109

127. Ibid., p. Ill

170

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

His function, however, is to discredit the media and set the stage for an-
timedia pressures that will reduce dissent and enhance the power and
freedom from criticism of the preferred and relevant disinformation.

Ledeen on the Bulgarian Connection. Ledeen discusses the Bulgarian
Connection in the framework of his critique of the media. He tries to
show that the media were lax in not pushing the case more aggressively.
He also uses the case to .reinforce the contention that the Bulgarian Con-
nection is true and the Evil Empire evil. This is a precious theme for the
disinformationists, and all of its members and associates try as best they
can to stress that the Connection is proved, and to make it into an in-
stitutionalized truth which no reasonable person could question.

In pressing the Connection, Ledeen relies heavily on Sterling-Henze
arguments, to which he adds his own quota of alleged facts and suppor-
tive innuendoes. He commends Sterling for her "careful article" which
was subjected f or many months "to checking, cutting, and rewriting"
(which if done for Andronov's work in Moscow, would presumably add
to its validity for Ledeen).

Ledeen follows the Sterling-Henze line on motive — that is, the
Soviets had a clear motive to shoot the Pope, and the Italians had no mo-
tive to put the blame for the shooting on the Bulgarians and KGB. On
the latter subject, Ledeen asks: Would Italian judges of "impeccable
reputation" (i.e., Ledeen likes what they are doing) push the case
"without compelling evidence? Would they jeopardize Italy's national
interest (which includes, at a minimum, good commercial relations with
the Soviet Empire) without something approaching solid proof?" 128
Like Sterling-Henze, Ledeen never mentions P-2, the "strategy of ten-
sion," Pazienza, SISMI, or the politics of the Cold War in Italy. He
doesn't even ask whether the pursuit of the case might have any spinoff
benefits to the Socialist and Christian Democratic Parties. The dishon-
esty and hypocrisy here are extraordinary: Just as Henze, the "expert"
on Turkey, ignores the Turkish roots of the assassination plot, Ledeen,
the "expert" on Italy, ignores the Italian context of Agca's confession.

"Bit by bit the logic of the case began to assert itself . . . ."'""Time
revealed that the Pope himself believed that Agca was part of a KGB
plot and went on to deal with the growing evidence." 150 The Papal Of-
fice denied this alleged belief, but even if it were true, of what eviden-

128. Ibid. pp. 127-28.

129. Ibid., p. 127.
130 Ibid., p. 126.

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

171

tial value is the Pope's belief? These allegations about "beliefs" and
' 'growing evidence' ' are rhetorical tricks that Ledeen resorts to time and
again.

His own touch is "that Agca's network of Bulgarians and Turks . . .
provided Agca with money, with the gun he fired at the Pope, and with
other forms of organizational assistance. . . ."" What is proven is that
Agca's network of Turkish Gray Wolves gave him money, his gun, and
organizational assistance; what still rests entirely on Agca's belated,
contradictory, and unverified claims is that these Turks were involved
with Bulgarians in the plot to shoot the Pope.

Ledeen alleges that the American press stayed away from the Bulga-
rian Connection. Initially, he tells us, the media suppressed the "facts"
of the Connection "because it would give added credibility to Haig's
claim that the Russians were behind a good deal of terrorism in the
world." 132 No supporting evidence is given for this assertion, which is
clearly shown to be totally false by the news story summaries in Appen-
dix A. He rules out the possibility that something convenient to a patrio-
tic line may be disbelieved because it is incredible and untrue. There
must be a hidden subversive motive. We will show in the next chapter
that his basic factual claim is false — the mass media swallowed and wal-
lowed uncritically in the Connection as soon as a remotely plausible
James Bond scenario was provided by Sterling and company.

Ledeen's statement on why journalists were hostile to the KGB plot is
followed by this: 133

But in several stories in early 1983 it was casually revealed that most know-
ledgeable people in the West are thoroughly convinced of this Soviet connec-
tion, particularly in the case of Italy. When Henry Kamm quoted his unnamed
Israeli intelligence source to undermine the Bulgarian connection, he went on to
provide considerable proof of Communist bloc involvement in international ter-
rorism. Sari Gilbert, the Washington Post's stringer in Rome, revealed on
March 20 that the Italians were quite convinced of a long-standing connection
between Eastern Europe (primarily Czechoslovakia) and the Red Brigades, a
point also made by Time and Newsweek. Thus, those of us who for years have
been arguing for such a connection — and were subjected to the most remarkable
scom from our colleagues in the elite media — have been vindicated. But the ac-
ceptance of these views is done in such a way as to deprive it of any political im-
pact.

131. Ibid., pp. 119-20.

132. Ibid., p. 127.

133. Ibid., pp. 129 30.

172

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

These lines combine direct lies, unproven allegations, faulty infer-
ences, stripped context, and innuendo. Note first the opening reference
to several stories that "casually revealed" that "most knowledgeable
people in the West were thoroughly convinced . . . ," etc. Ledeen
doesn't cite a single one of these alleged sources, nor does he discuss
their sampling procedures. Who are "knowledgeable people"? Note the
rhetorical ploy "casually revealed," which suggests authentic truth
("revealed") unreasonably given inadequate attention (only "casually"
advanced despite the staggering implications of the revelations). The
knowledgeable people are convinced of a Soviet Connection which in
the preceding sentence refers to a generic "terrorism." It is not even
clear that the knowledgeable people were asked anything specific about
the Bulgarian Connection (as opposed to a looser Soviet connection to
spies and assorted villainy).

Ledeen refers next to Henry Kamm's article in the New York Times in
which Kamm cited several intelligence officials who expressed doubts
about the Soviet involvement in the plot against the Pope. Both Sterling
and Ledeen jump on this to prove media negativism and attempts to
"undermine the Bulgarian Connection." This is patent nonsense that
misreads Kamm's article, takes it out of context, and misses the forest
for a single tree. Kamm's article was full of accusations and innuendoes
about Soviet and Bulgarian support for terrorism. More important, as
we describe in the next chapter, the Kamm article was exceptional in al-
lowing any negative assessments of the Connection to surface at all. Le-
deen thus suppresses the fact that surrounding the cited Kamm article
were dozens that passed on the Sterling-Henze view of the plot uncriti-
cally and helped build up the critical mass of a propaganda campaign.

Consider the next series of sentences, about Sari Gilbert and the Red
Brigades. Note the use of the words "revealed" and the "Italians were
quite convinced." If Sari Gilbert had "revealed" that Italians were con-
vinced that Michael Ledeen was a CIA flak, Ledeen would say that ' 're-
vealed" is a grossly inappropriate word because it implies that some-
thing is true. He would prefer "alleged." But in the case of a point that
he likes, where Sari Gilbert is saying something agreeable, she "re-
vealed" it. And "the point [is] also made" by Time and Newsweek —
not the "allegation" or "claim" is made, the point is made. The point
is now doubly established, because if Sari Gilbert and Time and News-
week agree, given the fact that they are subject to the bias of liberal class
interest and are very possibly manipulated by the KGB, their admissions
are contrary to interest — by neoconservative premise. That is why Sari

SIX: THE DISINFORMATIONISTS

173

Gilbert's statement is a "revelation" and true — and vindicates Michael
Ledeen. The point that is being made, or "revealed," is that the "Ital-
ians" allegedly believe something to be true. Presumably if "the Ital-
ians" believed in flying saucers, that would be all that Ledeen would re-
quire for the establishment of the truth of flying saucers.

In the passage quoted above, Ledeen concluded that "the acceptance
of these views is done in such a way as to deprive it of any political im-
pact." He suggests that this applies to the publicity on the plot to kill the
Pope. As we indicated in discussing the Kamm article, Ledeen and
Sterling pick and choose their evidence of critical attacks on the Bulga-
rian Connection and ignore the massive, supportive publicity. In the
next chapter we will provide evidence that the mass media of the United
States have presented the Bulgarian Connection in a systematically
biased fashion, featuring the disinformationists, and in such a way as to
maximize its political impact. In reading Michael Ledeen, the rule
should be: Take anything he says, stand it on its head, and you have a
better than average chance of approximating the truth.

7. The Dissemination off the
Bulgarian Connection Plot

A propaganda system is one which uses — and sometimes manufac-
tures — a politically serviceable fact or claim, gives it aggressive
and one-sided coverage, and excludes from discussion all critical facts
and analyses. An imperfect propaganda system will allow a small quan-
tum of leakage, but not enough to prevent the effective mobilization of
bias and the establishment of the convenient story as a patriotic truth in
the minds of the general public. In its handling of the Bulgarian Connec-
tion story the U.S. mass media behaved as an imperfect propaganda sys-
tem.

Media Processes in a Propaganda Campaign

Propaganda takes its effect, first, by repetition — by day-in-day-out
coverage which drives home the fact that something is important. It is
significant that the U.S. media do not provide day-in-day-out coverage
of the victims of death squads in Latin America, or assaults by South
Africa on its neighbors, or Indonesia's invasion and continuing pacifica-
tion of East Timor. These are actions and victims of "friendly" nations,
who provide an excellent investment climate and align themselves as
clients and military allies with the dominant powers of the Free World.
With them we therefore enter into "constructive engagement," and es-
chew boycotts and threats no matter how violent and unconscionable
their behavior. 1 On the other hand, victims of enemy powers — Cuban

I. The "human rights" policy of the Carter years did constitute a deviation from this
partem, but it was a deviation. A residue of the Vietnam War era, it was pressed by Con-
gress, and was frequently vigorously resisted and used heavily for rhetorical purposes by
the administration itself. Loaded with exceptions and weak in implementation against
client states, it was subject to intense and ultimately effective opposition by the business
community and military-industrial complex. See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman.

174

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

175

and Vietnamese refugees, Lech Walesa and Soviet dissidents — are sub-
jects of day-in-day-out coverage. A tabulation in The Real Terror Net-
work shows that between January 1 , 1976 and March 30, 1982, the New
York Times had more than twice as many articles on Anatoly
Shcharansky as it ran on an aggregate of 14 notable Free World victims
of state terror. Shcharansky generated five different spurts of intensive
coverage during that period. 2

The process of mobilizing bias depends heavily on the initiatives and
power of the mass media, with perhaps a dozen entities capable of get-
ting the ball rolling and sustaining interest. If several of these, like
Reader's Digest, NBC, and the New York Times decide to push a story,
it quickly becomes newsworthy. Many people hear of it, and thus other
members of the media fraternity feel obliged to get oh the bandwagon
because this is the news. When one of the authors (Herman) wanted to
write on both Cambodia and East Timor in 1 980, not Cambodia alone,
the editor of a liberal magazine objected on the ground that "nobody
had heard of ' East Timor. The Reader's Digest had had no article on
the subject; William Safire, Hugh Sidey, and William Buckley had not
discussed the matter; and the coverage of East Timor by the New York
Times had been inversely related to Indonesian state violence (starting
from a modest level and a pro-Indonesia bias to begin with). 3 With this
silence at the top of the media power structure, and thus "nobody hav-
ing heard of East Timor, ' ' only eccentricity could cause the lesser media
to bring up a subject so obviously unnewsworthy.

For news that is more acceptable to major power groups, if cir-
cumstances are ripe a propaganda campaign can be mobilized. Espe-
cially during periods when the business community is in an aggressive
mood, eager to discredit unionism, regulation, and the welfare state,
and has succeeded in bringing a conservative government into power
and frightening liberals into quiescence, Red Scares and even repressive
violence can occur. The press will then provide daily coverage of the
latest revelations of Red linkages, confessions, and newly found docu-
ments, and will carry speculation by notables on the intent of the con-
spirators. The aggressive and assured portrayal of the conspiracy as
clearly proven by the media elite produces an equally uncritical "popu-

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979),
pp. 33-37.

2. Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
(Boston: South End Press, 1982), pp. 196-99.

3. Sae Chomsky and Herman, op. nr.. n. I, pp. 145-51.

176

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

lar belief ' that helps stifle any opposition views in the rest of the media.
Such views are quickly seen as very "far out" and even subversively
deviant.

The mobilization of bias is helped along by the large number of right-
wing columnists who come into prominence in conservative eras. It is
the function of people like William Safire, George Will, and Ben Wat-
tenberg to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself to shift
the political spectrum farther to the right, and they leap into the fray
without any encumbrance by intellectual scruple. They are quickly
joined by conservative academics and thinktank operatives (Walter
Laqueur, Michael Novak, Ernest Lefever), who bring their "expertise"
to the proof of Red Evil and to the important task of keeping the issue
alive. In such an environment, with critical judgment by the mass media
suspended, rightwing propagandists given free rein, and dissident opin-
ion effectively excluded, lies can be institutionalized. As Murray Levin
concluded in his study of the Red Scare of 1919-20, millions of people
were led to believe in the existence of a Red Conspiracy "when no such
threat existed." 4

The Bulgarian Connection as a Media Propaganda Campaign

The mass media buildup of the Bulgarian-KGB Connection is a model
illustration of the principles and processes just outlined. Once again, it
is an alleged enemy act of villainy that is shown to be capable of gener-
ating day-in-day-out coverage. The process started with Claire Ster-
ling's Reader's Digest article and the NBC-TV program of September
21, 1982. But the real media buildup followed Agca's "confession,"
which led to the arrest of Antonov in late November. The New York
Times, for example, had only two articles on the Bulgarian Connection
in September 1982, none in October, and two in November; then it had
20 in December, 15 in January 1983, and a modest fall-off to 8 in Feb-
ruary. All the other major media enterprises — Time, Newsweek, the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the TV networks — had a
comparable escalation of coverage in December 1982 and January
1983. The second layer of media followed in close order with a spate of
articles; and commentators, humorists, and cartoonists attended to the

4. Murray B. Levin, Political Hysteria in America (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p.

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

177

Bulgarian Connection frequently during the high intensity period.

Besides its intensity, another indicator of the propagandistic character
of the campaign was that its news content was minimal. Of the 32 news
articles in the New York Times on, or closely related to, the Plot which
appeared between November 1, 1982 and January 31, 1983, 12 had no
news content whatever, but were reports of somebody's opinion or
speculation about the case — or even their refusal to speculate about it!
The Times carried one news article whose sole content was that Presi-
dent Reagan had "no comment" on the case. More typical was the
front-page article by Henry Kamm, "Bonn is Fearful Of Bulgaria Tie
With Terrorists" (December 22, 1982), or Bernard Gwertzman's "U.S.
Intrigued But Uncertain On a Bulgarian Tie" (December 26, 1982). In
"news report" after news report unnamed officials are "intrigued,"
their interest is "piqued," evidence is said to be "not wholly convinc-
ing," or "final proof is still lacking." Four of the news articles in the
Times were on peripheral subjects such as smuggling in Bulgaria or Vat-
ican-Soviet relations. Of the 16 more direct news items, only one
covered a really solid news fact: the arrest of Antonov in Rome. The
other 15 news items were trivia, such as Kamm's "Bulgarians Regret
Tarnished Image" (January 27, 1983), or another Kamm piece entitled
"Italian Judge Inspects Apartment of Suspect in Bulgarian Case" (Jan-
uary 12, 1983). All of these expressions of opinion, doubt, interest,
supposition, or news of minor details served to produce a lot of smoke,
and kept the issue of possible Soviet involvement before the public. The
New York Times was so aggressive in smoke creation that its article on
smuggling in Bulgaria was placed on the front page, with the heading
"Plot on Pope Aside, Bulgaria's Notoriety Rests on Smuggling" (Janu-
ary 28, 1983) — a little editorial reminder of the Plot for the benefit of
the reader, plus a further editorial judgment on "notoriety," all in a
single headline!

Smoke was also generated by the large stable of rightwing journalists
and scholars — Safire, Will, Buckley, Pipes, and of course the Big
Three — who took advantage of the newsworthiness of the Plot, added to
it, and kept the pot boiling. Another of their functions was to make it ap-
pear that not only was the proof clear, but that there was also a sinister
coverup in high places of the true extent and enormity of Soviet guilt. In
a charming little game, the CIA — reported to be "not sure," although
believing that the Soviets "at a minimum" knew about the Plot — was
made to appear the epitome of caution and judiciousness, not as a

178

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

longstanding participant in rightwing disinformation. 3 Time magazine
played this game with considerable flair, f ollowing Sterling in suggest-
ing that foot-dragging in Washington was based on the fear that the true
story "might scuttle any arms-control talks" (February 7, 1983). This
delightful gambit, which patriotically assumed Reagan's deep devotion
to arms control in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, thereby
converted a factor that might arouse suspicion as to the source of the
Plot into a basis of administration regrets and coy protection of the
Soviets.

Time also did a masterful job of building up its favored sources of evi-
dence — "normally cautious Italian politicians . . . exude confidence,"
"circumstantial evidence [which] . . . seems overwhelming" to U.S.
intelligence, the British alone remaining skeptical. On the other hand,
the Soviet reply was "emotional," with attacks on western journalists,
but not on Marvin Kalb, "which tends to add credibility to the facts as
well as to the tone [sic] of his reporting" (February 22, 1983). There
was the necessary playing down of the problem of the credibility of
Agca, his confession, his photo identification in the Italian police-
prison-political context; but Time threw in just enough in the way of in-
telligence doubts and admissions of lack of final proof so that their com-
pletely uncritical use of sources and packaged sell of the Connection
was not obvious.

As we noted earlier, rightwing analysts like Sterling and Ledeen took
articles like those of Toth and Kamm, in which intelligence agencies
were quoted as expressing doubts about Soviet involvement, and tried to
use these articles as evidence of CIA "foot-dragging" and reluctance to
pursue the "truth." But not only did the cited articles invariably impli-
cate the Soviets and Bulgarians one way or another, 6 they were also part
of a large cloud of smoke whose net effect was to sell the Connection.
The occasional qualified doubt or reservation actually contributed to the
net effect by giving the impression of fairness and reasonableness on the
part of the press. The modest qualifications that were allowed to surface
were swamped by the larger enthusiastic chorus of nondoubters.

A further characteristic of mass media coverage of the Bulgarian-

5. Robert Toth, "Bulgaria Knew of Plot on Pope, CIA Concludes," Los Angeles
Times, January 30, 1983.

6. Toth's article incriminated the Bulgarians by suggesting that they knew about the
plot but did nothing to prevent its implementation. Kamm transmitted western intelligence
agency doubts about Soviet involvement in the plot to assassinate the Pope, but conveyed
strong claims about Soviet contributions to "terrorism."

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

179

KGB Connection that fits a propaganda model has been the virtually
complete exclusion of dissenting opinion. The "debate" is confined to
assertions and speculations by western terrorism experts, intelligence
sources, and politicians, on the one hand, and Soviet and Bulgarian de-
nials on the other. Communist denials, obviously to be expected, come
from a source that the public will not find believable. Western critics of
the story , who might have greater credibility , are not admitted to the de-
bate.

In the news articles and opinion pieces in the New York Times be-
tween November 1, 1982 and January 31, 1983, for example, not one
serious voice of opposition is to be found. (This characteristic also ap-
plied to the Times' s coverage up to the time of the trial in 1985.) The
Times, like Time, conveyed the views of the CIA, Italian politicians, the
establishment terrorism experts, other intelligence services, and of
course Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski's belief in Soviet involvement
was put forth in a "news" article devoted solely to this enlightening
fact; and the Times' then gave Brzezinski Op-Ed column space to restate
his opinion. This is a good illustration of the main form of editorial writ-
ing in the mass media — confining questions and answers in purported
"news" articles to those whose conclusions preclude the necessity of
the editor expressing his or her personal judgment.

A final important propaganda characteristic of media coverage of the
Bulgarian Connection, implicit in a number of the preceding points, was
the media's suspension of critical analysis and investigatory zeal. For
system-supportive claims of enemy evil, the mass media do not require
much in the way of evidence or plausibility. They join a herd-like
chorus with patriotic enthusiasm. As we have noted, the 1982 Sterling
Reader's Digest article and the associated NBC-TV special contained
no credible evidence of a Bulgarian Connection, and were crudely de-
magogic. Analogous claims of CIA involvement in the Plot, if recog-
nized at all, would have been carefully examined and scornfully dis-
missed. 7 A propaganda system chooses its preferred myths and
scenarios, disseminates them without critical scrutiny, and protects
them from attack. Disinformation has free sway, eliciting no threatening
flak; critics of that disinformation, who would elicit flak, are mar-
ginalized. 8

7. We show in Appendix D that the Soviet journalist [jna Andronov made a case Tor a
CIA connection to Agca and the assassination attempt that is certainly more persuasive
than the case made by Sterling against the KGB. Andronov's work is unknown in the
United States.

8. One media official told the authors that f or any criticisms of the Connection, the pro-

180

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Following the huge spurt of publicity between December 1982 and
February 1983, press coverage of the Bulgarian Connection fell to a
lower level. But it was periodically renewed with fresh disclosures and
new leaks from Rome. For example, in a long article in the New York
Times on March 23, 1983, Nicholas Gage passed on claims made by
French counterintelligence that a Bulgarian defector had implicated both
the Bulgarian state security agency and the Soviet KGB in the papal as-
sassination plot. The defector was Iordan Mantarov, supposedly a
former deputy commercial attache at the Bulgarian Embassy in Paris,
who repeated information he had allegedly received from one Dimiter
Savov before defecting in July 1981. Mantarov identified Savov as a
high ranking Bulgarian counterintelligence official. The Bulgarian gov-
ernment responded that Mantarov had actually been a maintenance
mechanic at a Bulgarian-owned company in Paris called Ag-
romachinaimpeks, which exports farm equipment. In a small article re-
porting the Bulgarian government's response on April 8, 1983, Craig R.
Whitney, foreign editor of the New York Times, admitted that Mantarov
was not listed on the Bulgarian Embassy roster, which as a commercial
attache he certainly would have been. (The Bulgarians also denied that
any "Savov" worked for the state security agency, and noted that this
was a common Bulgarian surname.) 9 Despite the quick collapse of this
apparently new evidence, the Mantarov story has retained its usefulness
to the disinformationists: On the opening day of Agca's trial, for exam-
ple, Paul Henze reminded Judy Woodruff on the MacNeil/Lehrer News
Hour that the testimony of the Bulgarian defector Mantarov had con-
gram would have had to make sure "of every comma." He noted thai such care was not
required for pro-Plot programming.

9. Gage's story, on which he supposedly spent two months while traveling to seven
countries, appeared only days before his cover story in the New York Times Sunday
Magazine describing his search, while working as a Times reporter, for the Greek Com-
munist who reportedly murdered his mother during the civil war in the 1940s. In the arti-
cle Gage described himself as armed and seeking vengeance, though he ultimately could
not bring himself to act when he found the alleged murderer. The movie version of his
book on the subject was reviewed critically in the New York Times. Jimmy Carr reports
that Gage "thinks it may have stemmed from his unfashionable antileftist stance. 'I think
there is a double standard in judging evil people if they're rightist or leftist,' he says "
("Gage says 'Eleni' 'payment' to mother," Boston Globe, November 10, 1985.) In as-
signing Gage to investigate the Bulgarian Connection, the Times undoubtedly considered
him "objective" in reporting on a matter of potentially great East- West tension.

For a devastating account of Gage's background and misrepresentations of history in
Eleni, see Nikos Raptis, " 'Eleni': The work of a 'Professional Liar,' " CovertAction In-
formation Bulletin, Number 25 (Winter 1986).

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

181

firmed Agca's original testimony, which was suddenly threatened by
Agca's announcement that he was Jesus Christ.

Considerable news coverage was also generated by Agca's informal
news conference of July 7, 1983. Emmanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a
Vatican official, had been kidnapped, and messages purportedly from
the kidnappers had demanded Agca's release in exchange for the kidnap
victim. Agca was brought from his prison cell to a courtroom to testify
on these events. In the process, the media were assembled and Agca
was allowed to engage in some verbal exchanges with reporters. Agca
reiterated his new devotion to liberty and shouted that the Bulgarians
and the KGB were both involved in the assassination attempt. Agca's
claims were broadcast on all U.S. television networks that evening; the
introductory lead-in was that Agca had at last brought the KGB directly
into the case. The new and highly significant retractions that Agca had
made two weeks earlier, by contrast, were not leaked to the press (or
were not reported by the press). In fact, Agca's retractions were not
even hinted at by the media for the entire year that followed.

The case took off with renewed vigor in June 1984 with a front-page
article in the New York Times by Claire Sterling herself, giving an ac-
count of the Albano Report. 10 This sparked a new set of follow-up arti-
cles and interviews which stressed the enhanced likelihood of Bulgarian
guilt, given the claims of the Italian prosecutor. Another surge of pub-
licity took place in late October 1984, when Magistrate Martella issued
his final Report, claiming the evidence sufficient to send the accused
Bulgarian Antonov and others to trial . The beginning of the trial itself
sparked a further stage of media interest, although the events of the trial,
with Agca finally exposed to full public view, quickly began to erode
the established presumption of Bulgarian guilt.

The Dominance of Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen in Media
Coverage

As we noted in Chapter 2, for some months following the assassination
attempt the main thrust of media attention was on Agca's Turkish fascist
background. With the publication of Sterling's Reader's Digest article,

10. New York Times, June 10, 1984. See below, pp. 190-94. In an extraordinary depar-
ture from its standard practice, the Times gave Sterling a page-one by-line, and did not in-
dicate that she was not a staff reporter (until the end of the article, on an inside page).

182

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the airing of the NBC-TV programs of September 1982 and January
1983, and Agca's declarations in November 1982, the media shifted en
masse to an uncritical acceptance of the Bulgarian Connection. Sterling
and Henze were quickly established as the "experts" on the Plot, and
their line was institutionalized and preserved more or less intact until the
beginning of the trial in May 1985. The predominance of Sterling and
Henze (and to a lesser extent Ledeen) in mass media coverage of the
subject cannot be described with precision, because much of their influ-
ence was indirect, as others in the mass media read, heard, and absorbed
their message. However, we have attempted to summarize their
hegemonic position in the accompanying table, which describes their
importance in nine major media outlets during two and a half years of a
virtually uncontested line.

Table 7.1. Sterling-Henze-Ledeen Dominance of Mass Media
Coverage of the Bulgarian Connection, September 1982-May 198S.

Media
Outlet

Domestic
Circulation
or Broadcast
Audience

Extent of
Dominance

Evidence

Reader's
Digest

18, 012,397 s

Complete

Sponsor of Sterling (see text);
no deviation to be found

NBC-TV

7,500,0OO b

Virtually
complete

Kalb close ally of S-H, latter
consultants on 2 major programs;
no serious deviation

MacNeil/
Lehrer

3.000,000 c

Virtually
complete

76% of time given to S-H-L; no
dissident allowed (see text)

Wall Street
Journal

1 .959.873"

Virtually
complete

Sterling only outside commenta-
tor, with 3 separate items,
favorable book review and
editorial citations; no dissent e

a. Taken from Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for March-September 1984, The
1985 IMSIAyer Directory of Publications. IMS Press, Fort Washington, Pa.

b. Number of households estimated by Nielsen to have watched the NBC-TV program
of September 21. 1982 on "The Plot Against the Pope."

c. Average household audience in early 1985 as estimated by staff of the News Hour.

d. For an analysis of the September 21,1 982 program, see Frank Brodhead and Edward
S. Herman, "The KGB Plot to Assassinate the Pope: A Case Study in Free World Disin-
formation," CovertAction Information Bulletin, Number 19, Spring-Summer 1983.

e. Reflecting the dichotomy between the quality news offerings and pre-Neanderthal

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT
Table 7.1 Continued.

183

Domestic
Circulation
Media or Broadcast Extent of

Outlet Audience / Dominance Evidence

Christian

Science

Monitor

CBS-TV
News

New York
Times

Newsweek

Time

141,247 Virtually
complete

11,200,000 Virtually
complete

934,530 a Virtually
(daily) complete
1,533,720
(Sunday)

3,037,277 Virtually
complete

4.630.687 3 Substantial

Henze primary reporter-
commentator, accounting for 1 2
of 14 articles, Jan. 1, 1983-
July 15, 1985

3 in-depth interviews with
Sterling; no dissent or critical
analysis at any time (see text)

Bought Henze information; used
Sterling as news reporter; adopt-
ed S-H line intact; no deviant
facts or analyses allowed
December 1982-May 1985
(see text)

Henze primary source of major
article January 3, 1983; no
deviation from S-H line

No evidence of direct use, but as
with Newsweek, no deviation
from S-H line 6

Editorial Page, while the latter offered pure Sterling through August I98S, the news col-
umn put out the excellent pair of articles by Jonathan Kwilny cited in the text, although
these did not appear until August 1985.

f. An average value for households watching the daily evening news program in De-
cember 1984 and January 1985, taken from the Nielsen National TV Rating Reports.

g. Not only did Time follow the Sterling-Henze line, in an unusual footnote to one arti-
cle it paid homage to Sterling as follows: "Late last year, Sterling brought out a book. The
Time of the Assassins, that meticulously expounded the theory of a Bulgarian connection.
It was greeted with some skepticism in many quarters, including the pages of the New
York Times" ("Thickening Plot," June 25, 1984). As we discuss in the text, the slight
skepticism shown in the New York Times was confined to two superficial and overgener-
ous book reviews.

The essence of the propaganda line that the Big Three successfully in-
stitutionalized had six main elements:

( 1 ) Agca is a credible witness. The belatedness of his confession, his
lies, his retractions, and the lack of independent confirmation of his

184

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

claims can all be explained and do not cast reasonable doubts on his pri-
mary allegations.

(2) The core evidence is Agca's stay in Sofia, Bulgaria, his claims of
meetings with Bulgarian emissaries there, and his identification of Bul-
garians in Rome with whom he allegedly conspired to carry out the as-
sassination attempt.

(3) The Bulgarians would not initiate such an act on their own. They
were obviously being directed by the KGB.

(4) The Bulgarians and Soviets may be presumed guilty on the basis
of Agca's claims.

(5) The motive which led them to this despicable act was their desire
to quell the uprising in Poland by eliminating an individual lending the
Poles moral support.

(6) The wanton immorality and recklessness of the assassination at-
tempt are the kinds of things we would expect of the Soviet leadership.

The line was institutionalized by giving the Big Three the floor and
making no effort to probe beneath their renditions of the Plot. As we
described earlier, once a system-supportive propaganda theme is ac-
cepted and pressed by the top media, it is sustained by popular belief as
well as an institutional nexus. It becomes difficult and even risky to
challenge the new line and easy to ignore dissent. In most instances the
major media would not want to encourage dissent anyway. This was ob-
viously true in the case of the Reader's Digest, where the line was con-
veyed by exclusive reliance on Sterling. Other major media also pressed
the party line with positive and uncritical enthusiasm. In the two major
NBC-TV programs of 1982-83, Sterling and Henze were consultants
and their imprint is clear throughout. Marvin Kalb, the narrator of these
programs, provided the bulk of NBC-TV's subsequent coverage of the
case, which continued to argue energetically for the Connection. Even
CBS-TV News and the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, supposedly the
more "liberal" purveyors of TV news, served as straight conduits of the
propaganda line. A closer look at CBS and MacNeil/Lehrer, to which
we now tum, shows how the disinformationists and media use each
other.

CBS-TV News. A review of CBS-TV News's coverage of the Bulgarian
Connection between November 25, 1982, and September 30, 1984,
shows that the program gave great play to Claire Sterling and attention
to other supporters of the Bulgarian Connection hypothesis, but allowed
not a single witness hostile to the line. Sterling was used in three long,

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

185

in-depth interviews, during which she made all her standard points: The
Bulgarians and Soviets are surely guilty, western intelligence agencies
are dragging their feet, and the Pope himself believes in a Soviet-Bloc
conspiracy. She was asked no critical (or intelligent) questions. CBS
News also cited three different Bulgarian defectors to make the same
points. Zbigniew Brzezinski was given an opportunity to assert his be-
lief in the Bulgarian Connection and the need to take aggressive retalia-
tory action. Agca's various claims of Bulgarian and Soviet involvement
were broadcast on several occasions, without critical comment. No con-
trary views were provided.

CBS News also used a number of unnamed sources to allege Bulgar-
ian involvement in the kidnapping and interrogation of General Dozier
and in other unnamed Bulgarian "operations" in Italy. CBS used
selected Italian news accounts that supported claims of a Bulgarian Con-
nection and avoided the large number of news accounts that raised
doubts about the Plot. In short, CBS News did not depart even once
from an uncritical dissemination of the Sterling-Henze line in the period
from November 1982 through September 1984.

The MacNeillLehrer News Hour. The coverage of the Bulgarian Con-
nection by the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour was also extraordinary for its
conformist bias and absence of any application of critical intelligence.
This is in line with the general character of the program, which has cho-
sen the easy road of accommodating the powerful: obtaining established
and mainly conservative brand names as news respondents, and then
never asking them challenging questions.

In the three programs on which the Bulgarian Connection was ad-
dressed, there were only five individuals interviewed:" Paul Henze,
Michael Ledeen, Claire Sterling, Harry Gelman, and Barry Carter. The
Big Three accounted for 76 percent of the discussion time on these pro-
grams. 12 Gelman was a former CIA officer and Carter a former member
of the National Security Council. In short, there was no dissident or crit-

1 1 . We exclude from (his count interviewees in a video insert on the subject from (he
Canadian Broadcasting System, which was a segment or the News Hour program of May
27, 1985. The quotations below are from the official transcript.

12. The percentage would fall to 60 if we include the CBC documentary film, which
itself used Sterling and did not depart in any way from the Sterling-Henze party line. The
documentary, apparently based on an earlier Italian State Television production, used ac-
tors to dramatize Agca's version of his movements and those of the Bulgarians im-
mediately prior to the assassination attempt.

186

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ical voice in any of these programs. CIA officer Gelman cautiously
raised a few possible objections to the standard line, which in the end he
did not dispute. He failed entirely to offset the aggressive and assured
propaganda outpourings of the Big Three.

The bias in news sourcing was reinforced by the failure to identify
properly the Big Three. While Gelman was identified as a former CIA
officer, in all three appearances on the News Hour Henze was described
only as a consultant to Rand and a former member of Carter's National
Security Council, not as a long-time CIA officer and former CIA chief
of station in Turkey. (Mention of Henze's position on Carter's NSC
may have been intended to suggest program balance, offsetting Le-
deen's link to the Republicans.) Ledeen was identified only as as-
sociated with the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International
Studies and the State Department. No mention was made of his link to
Francesco Pazienza or Licio Gelli of P-2, f acts which were already in
the public domain in January 1983. Sterling was introduced by an awed
Jim Lehrer as perhaps the "only" journalist expert on terrorism, and the
first to report "authoritatively on the networks about terrorists." 13

Putting before the public a trio of "experts" with enormous biases,
the MacNeil-Lehrer team then proceeded to ask them a series of unintel-
ligent and open-ended questions that almost always assumed in advance
the truth of the Bulgarian Connection. 14 Of 55 questions asked on the
three programs, only one had critical substance. (Robert MacNeil asked
Henze about the 1979 Agca letter threatening to kill the Pope, sent out
before Solidarity existed.) Otherwise the questions ran like this: (Mac-
Neil) "Mr. Ledeen, is the Bulgarian Connection with Agcaand this plot
credible to you?" (Lehrer to Sterling) "And there is no doubt in your
mind about it, is there?" and "No question in your mind that the
Soviets knew what was going on?" A great many of the questions were
vague inquiries about opinions on Soviet involvement, Soviet reactions,
and what our responses should be if the case should be proved. Judy
Woodruff even asked Henze whether the Soviets might have "any de-
sire to try this again," as if the fact of their guilt was already estab-
lished. Jim Lehrer asked Henze, "Well, one piece of speculation I read
today was that he [Agca] went from Iran to the Soviet Union. Is there

13. In fact, reviews in the quality newspapers did not find her analysis of the terror net-
work "authoritative." and scholarly reviews considered her work distressingly in-
adequate.

14. As we mentioned in Chapter 6, Henze insists on control over the script, which may
help explain the almost complete absence probing questions

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

187

anything to that?" Instead of a question based on fact or the internal
logic of the case, Lehrer threw out a giveaway and biased piece of
speculation that a professional propagandist would quickly take advan-
tage of. Henze answered "Well, it is entirely possible."

In his introductory remarks to the program of January 5, 1983, Lehrer
gave a summary of the "facts" of the case that was both biased and er-
roneous. For example, he said that in Turkey Agca was arrested f or the
assassination of "a prominent newspaper editor." In fact, Ipekci was
also a leading progressive editor, but including that would raise a ques-
tion about Agca's affiliations. Lehrer said that after his escape from
Turkey Agca traveled around, "ending up eventually in Sofia, Bul-
garia." This is a distortion of fact. Agca started out through Bulgaria
and ended up in Italy, and spent most of his travel time in countries of
Western Europe. Lehrer stated as an unqualified fact that Agca "met
three Bulgarians" in Sofia, and ended up asking Henze whether there is
"anything you would add to my description of what the evidence is up
'til now?"

Besides open-ended questions without substance, the most notable
feature of the interviewing style of the MacNeil-Lehrer team was their
failure to ask questions that beg to be asked in the flow of the interview.
For example, Henze said that "It's inconceivable that the Bulgarians,
which [sic] does, after all, follow Turkish affairs closely and which is
right next door, didn't know who Agca was." No question was raised
by MacNeil or Lehrer on either how a single Turk with a false passport
would be readily identifiable, or why Agca was not known to the au-
thorities in West Germany, Switzerland, and Italy by similar reasoning.
Henze also suggested that Agca was instructed by the Kremlin to write
his 1979 letter threatening the Pope: "I can see no other reason why
Agca would write a letter about the Pope. The Pope's visit to Turkey
went off very successfully and there was no opposition to it." If Mac-
Neil and Lehrer had done the least amount of homework they would
have discovered that Gray Wolves ideology could explain the letter, and
that Henze's statement that there was "no opposition" to the Pope's
visit was a fabrication — the Nationalist Action Party-Gray Wolves press
was violently hostile to the visit." The idea that Agca was under KGB
discipline to the point that they would instruct him to write a specific let-

15. In his book. Papa. Mafya. Agca (Istanbul: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984), Ugur Mumcu
provided extensive evidence, including numerous quotations from the Turkish newspa-
pers Hergun and Tercuman strongly hostile to the Pope's visit, to show that this claim of
Henze's is a plain falsehood.

188

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ter is not only lacking in a trace of evidence, it suggests further ques-
tions. Henze had just told his interviewers, rather indignantly, that the
Bulgarians surely must have recognized Agca when he entered from
Turkey shortly after writing the 1979 letter. But if he was already under
tight KGB discipline, the problem of recognition is foolish: Why would
the Bulgarians want to "recognize" a KGB agent? A question that
would arise with a coherent analysis is: How could the KGB and Bulga-
rians be so foolish as to bring Agca to Sofia for an extended stay to get
his instructions? But Henze 's confusion and the questions staring one in
the face are never confronted by the kindly MacNeil-Lehrer inter-
rogators.

MacNeil-Lehrer never once asked about the massive violations of
"plausible deniability" in the KGB-Bulgarian hiring of Agca, bringing
him to Sofia, and then involving numerous Bulgarian officials in his
Rome operation. They never raised a question about the enormous time
lag in Agca's naming Bulgarians, nor the reports in the Italian press that
Agca was given substantial inducement to talk, or the great convenience
of the Plot from the standpoint of western political interests. Although
the MacNeil-Lehrer show had run a program on the P-2 scandal, they
never raised a question about the Italian political-judicial context or the
conduct of the case. Sterling cited a report by the Italian secret service
SISMI on the Soviet connection to Italian terrorism, but Lehrer never
asked about SISMI's links to P-2 or the long history of Italian intelli-
gence agency forgery and participation in rightwing destabilization
plans. " When Sterling spoke about Agca's confessions being "corrobo-
rated in astonishing detail," Lehrer was too ignorant or politically
biased to ask an intelligent question based on Agca's retractions and the
ability to produce "astonishing detail" about things he admitted he had
never seen in his life.

Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen all stressed with great energy how mar-
velous Magistrate Martella was and how beautifully the Italian judicial
process was working. Barry Carter added that "The Italians appear to
be doing a good investigative job." MacNeil-Lehrer once again asked
no questions. (E.g., "Mr. Carter, how do you know how good a job the
Italians are doing given the secrecy of much of the process? How do you
reconcile your statement with the frequent leaks that are supposedly
contrary to Italian legal rules of secrecy?")

Paul Henze told Judy Woodruff on June 25, 1985, that except for the

16. See Chapter 4, pp. 86-99

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

189

Soviet blaming of things on the CIA, "nobody has ever advanced any
other explanation of the plot." This was a knowing fabrication, as a
number of investigators in Europe and the United States, including the
present authors, had given a two plot version of events: a Turkish plot to
kill the Pope, and an Italian secret services/Mafia/rightwing plot to im-
plicate the Bulgarians and Soviets by manipulating Agca. But Henze
could contradict himself and tell outright lies without opposition on a
program that allows the spokespersons for a propaganda line free and
uncontested play.

The New York Times-Sterling-Ledeen Axis

In an editorial published on August 15, 1985, the New York Times fi-
nally announced that the Plot being acted out in Rome was reminiscent
of "a farce by Pirandello." By a coincidence, the present writers had
described the case in similar terms many months earlier, but we
explicitly mentioned the New York Times as an active participant in the
farce: 17

The Bulgarian Connection thus provides a scenario worthy of a plot by Piran-
dello: Influential disinformation specialists linked to the Italian secret services
and the Reagan administration create a useful scenario, sell it to the slow-mov-
ing Italians, who then implement it — with the final touch being that the New
York Times [el al.] . . . then rely on Henze, Sterling, and Ledeen to elucidate
the real story on what the nefarious KGB has been up to!

The Times'% editorial, however, took no credit for the farce. It is just
that Agca now lacked credibility; there was no "independent confirma-
tion" of his claims; he altered details at will; and there was a simpler
hypothesis available — namely, "that the roots of the plot were in Tur-
key." The Times asserted, of course, that Agca's earlier account "was
sufficiently convincing" to have justified proceeding to a trial. But this
is disingenuous. The Times swallowed Agca's earlier assertions without
question, although they were not independently confirmed, and al-
though he had a reputation as a "chronic liar" (in the words of the
Times's own correspondent Marvine Howe). In its editorial of De-
cember 18, 1982, the Times asserted as a positive fact that "he [Agca]

17. Frank Brodhead and Edward S. Herman, "The KGB Plot to Assassinate the Pope:
A Case Study in Free World Disinformation," CovertAction Information Bulletin, No. 19
(Spring-Summer 1983), p. 5.

190

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

checked into Sofia's best hotels," although this Agca claim was never
"corroborated." In an editorial of June 21, 1984, the Times asserted
that Agca's "detailed accounts of meetings with Bulgarian agents in
Sofia and Rome . . . [have] been cross-checked and, with conspicuous
exceptions, corroborated where possible." This evasive statement fails
to mention that the corroborations were only negative; that is, the Bul-
garians did not have alibis two years after the event adequate to satisfy
Martella. 18 No evidence has ever been produced verifying the delivery
of money for the assassination attempt or the rental of the getaway car,
nor has a single person been found to testify that he or she had seen
Agca with a Bulgarian. That is, by August 1985 nothing in the case had
changed, except the Times' s assessment of its public salability.

We described earlier how the New York Times's coverage of the Bul-
garian Connection from December 1982 through March 1983 fits well a
model of a propaganda operation. Apart from the initial flurry of inves-
tigation in the immediate aftermath of the shooting (see Appendix A),
the only independent research commissioned by the Times was that of
Nicholas Gage, whose deeply flawed effort was discussed above. We
saw in the previous section that the Times did not mention Agca's major
retractions of June 28, 1983, for over a year. It also refused to entertain
a word of dissenting opinion or analysis in thai period, although these
were available and offered to it. 1 " In effect, the editors of the paper
adopted the Sterling-Henze line as either true, politically useful, sala-
ble, or some combination of these, and refused to look at the issue criti-
cally or even allow minimal debate in its pages.

The Albano Report. The low point in the Times' a coverage of the Bulga-
rian Connection was reached on June 10, 1984, when the paper featured
a long front-page story by Claire Sterling on the still "secret" Albano
Report. Sterling was a strong-minded partisan on this issue, and while
she had a background as a reporter, her recent work with the Reader's
Digest and in her book The Terror Network indicated that she had de-
teriorated from a mediocre Cold War reporter to a rightwing crank.
Given her record, it was inevitable that Sterling would distort any news

18 This is the subjeel to which Martella devoted his maximum energies See Chapter

19. An excellent Op-Ed article by Diana Johnstone, European Editor of In These Times,
which discussed the already impressive evidence that Agca had been threatened and in-
duced lo implicate the Bulgarians, was rejected by the paper in 1983. A minor exception
to the generalization in the text was a single letter lo the editor attacking the Connection
writlen by Carl Oglesby.

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

191

as a result of her commitment and ideology, and this is what she did
with the Albano Report.

The Albano Report is a highly political document, full of rhetorical
flourishes and simple misstatements of fact ("Extraordinary is the at-
tempt on his life f the Pope's] as the only such case in history"). 20 Al-
bano dismissed the notion that there could be a frameup of Bulgarians as
outmoded Cold War propaganda, because Italy had no grudge against
Bulgaria and no political purpose could be served by such actions. 21 On
the other hand, as the Bulgarians had been accused by Agca, any
Bulgarian statements (as opposed to those of the politically neutral Ital-
ian police) were statements of an interested party and must be regarded
with suspicion." Furthermore, although the idea of any Italian advan-
tage or interest in attacking the East was old Cold War stuff, there was
an "iron logic" (a phrase repeated more than once) in the case suggest-
ing an eastern assault on the institutions of the West.

People who Albano found credible were: (I) Albano himself. Al-
though a devout Catholic, a matter brought up by him in his Report, he
was "without any political, religious or moral prejudice whatever.""
(2) Agca. Although Albano acknowledged that Agca told many lies, he
was cited as an authority for dozens of unconfirmed statements. (3) Ar-
naud de Borchgrave, whose statements the Report refers to as "abso-
lutely unquestionable."" (4) Officials of the Italian intelligence ser-
vices. Because they stated for the record that they had not spoken to
Agca on any serious matters, this settled the question of coaching for the
Prosecutor. (5) Claire Sterling. Albano's Report parrots the Sterling line

20. Report of May 8, 1984, of stale prosecutor Antonio Albano (hereafter Albano Re-
port), p 2. A papal assassination had many precedents. According to one account:

"Few popes in the century following John VIII died peacefully in their beds. As we
have seen, John VIII himself was murdered; Stephen VI (896-97) strangled in prison; Be-
nedict VI (973-74) smothered, John XIV (983-84) done to death in the Castel Sanf
Angelo " Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1968), p. 63. This quotation is far from exhausting the record of papal assassina-
tions and assassination attempts.

21. Albano Report, p. 3 We pointed out earlier that the P-2 hearings on SISMI provide
evidence from SISMI head Santovito himself that the organization had spent considerable
effort trying to pin various crimes on the Communist Party and other political enemies.
These documents were available to Albano (and to any American newspaper with enter
prise and integrity)

22. Albano Report, p. 4

23. Ibid., p. 5.
24 Ibid., p. 30.

192

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

in such detail that she must be regarded as the intellectual godmother if
not an actual co-author. Thus the Report uses the signaling theory, for
example, with Agca bargaining for release by cautious disclosures. It
stresses a la Sterling that Agca has always been consistent on the core of
his charges — namely, that the originally named Bulgarians are guilty. It
asserts that the changes Agca made in his testimony were always "spon-
taneous," at his own initiative, and would not have occurred but for
Agca's voluntary acts." As we discussed in Chapter 5, this is highly
misleading: The initiatives frequently followed real world events that
made his prior claims untenable.

Albano added his own original touch to the motives for Agca's retrac-
tions. He was signaling, but he was also telling Antonov and the Bulgar-
ians that he bore them no grudges: "Essentially this is the hand held up
to Antonov, an undoubted indication that Agca holds no malice, no per-
verse acrimony, no venomous vindictiveness. " J6 Another wonderful
touch is the Report's explanation of how Agca could know facts about
apartments that he subsequently admitted never having visited. The an-
swer is that Agca's retractions were false; Agca really had been to all of
those places! Albano is the iron logician. Having disproved the coach-
ing hypothesis — i.e., SISMI had no axe to grind, and said it was inno-
cent — it follows by iron logic that Agca must have been to places he de-
nied ever having seen. This is extremely convenient for the prosecution:
Only assertions fitting the a priori iron logic of the case will be taken as
true; others are disposed of as "the" lies! Thus the Albano Report states
that "At these collective sessions [held by Agca with the Bulgarians in
Rome] they also planned an attempt on the life of Lech Walesa who was
visiting Italy in January 1981, and the possibility was contemplated to
attack Walesa and the Pope simultaneously, as the two were scheduled
to meet." 27 This Albano puts as fact, even though it is far-fetched, was
never "independently corroborated" by anybody, and even though
Agca later denied some of the meetings and his participation in the al-
leged Walesa plot.

Another illustration of the power of logic in Albano's Report is its use
of Agca's lavish expenditures in Europe as evidence for eastern involve-
ment in the assassination plot. At one point Albano noted that the Tur-
kish drug Mafia had money, citing Agca's escape from prison in Turkey
as a demonstration of "what the Mafia's money and efficiency can

25. Ibid. , pp. 15-16.

26. Ibid., p. 71

27. Ibid., p. 21

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

193

do." 28 He gave no evidence that the prison escape was not a strictly
Gray Wolves operation, nor that money was important for a prison
break. Later on, however, he asked, "How can we account for the
money Agca squandered so lavishly on hotel accommodations, restau-
rants, " etc., unless we trace it to a political source and by iron logic to
the Bulgarians? The answer he gave earlier and had forgotten was that
the Turkish-Gray Wolves drug connection yielded a great deal of
money.

Reading Sterling in the New York Times of June 10, 1984, one would
have missed all sense of the bias, incompetence, and comedy that Al-
bano's Report affords. Readers would also not have been informed
about the one new major fact in the Report that up to that time had been
kept out of the U.S. press — namely, that on June 28, 1983, Agca had
retracted a significant portion of his evidence. Sterling's only hint at the
retraction runs as follows:

Despite widespread press reports, Mr. Agca will probably not have to face the
curious charge of "self-slander and slander" that arose from his brief retraction
of some testimony that had already been corroborated. Judge Martella sent him
a communication that he was under investigation for such charge last September
in regard to certain confusing allegations of his in the Lech Walesa plot.

The serious misrepresentations in these sentences may be seen from
the following:

(1) What Sterling calls "confusing allegations" was Agca's state-
ment that he had lied about having participated in a plot to murder
Walesa! Although he had described Walesa's hotel in detail, he admit-
ted that he had never seen it, and that he had never met the Bulgarian
diplomat whom he had identified from a photo as a co-conspirator.
There is nothing "confusing" in these allegations.

(2) Sterling states that Agca only retracted testimony that "had al-
ready been corroborated." This is a fabrication. Agca withdrew the
claims that he had met Mrs. Antonov and her daughter and visited An-
tonov's apartment. Agca's ability to recall precise details of the apart-
ment had been previously advanced by the Sterling school as proof of
his claims. His description of Mrs. Antonov was taken as "corrobora-
tion" of his claim to have met her. In no other sense were Agca's claims
"corroborated," and the dishonesty of Sterling's assertions in the face
of Agca's admitted lying about "corroborated evidence" is extraordi-

28. Ibid., p 9

194

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

nary. Even the prosecutor admitted the serious effect of these retractions
on Agca's credibility, but in her purported news article Sterling sup-
pressed both Agca's retractions and Albano's statement on the meaning
of those retractions.

Following the June 10, 1984 front-page article, the New York Times
ran another front-page article by Sterling on October 27, 1984, in which
she finally acknowledged Agca's retractions of June 28, 1983. Even
here, however, the bulk of the article was devoted to presenting the de-
tails of the claims which Agca had withdrawn, and she tried to minimize
the significance of the retractions by her usual formulas. Once again she
asserted that Agca's original confessions provided a wealth of details
that were "independently confirmed." But if Agca wasn't there — either
at Walesa's hotel or Antonov's apartment — independent corroboration
is not only meaningless, it also points to judicial fraud. Sterling then re-
sorted to her signaling theory, claiming like Albano that Agca really
was there, and that his retractions were false. According to Sterling, he
was responding to the kidnapping of Emmanuela Orlandi on June 22,
1983. We have discussed her signaling theory in Chapter 6 and shown
its complete implausibility, but also its great utility for ex post facto
rationalization of anything one wishes to prove.

The Trial. Once the trial in Rome was under way, the Times's on-the-
scene reporter was John Tagliabue. Tagliabue had been the Times' s re-
porter in Germany when the assassination attempt occurred. At that time
he contributed several useful articles on the Gray Wolves in West Ger-
many, and on the West German government's unsuccessful efforts to
determine whether and how long Agca stayed there and the nature of his
activities. His performance during the trial, by contrast, illustrates the
hegemony of the Sterling model in shaping the Times's coverage of the
Connection.

Tagliabue' s troubles began on the first day of the trial, when Agca de-
clared that he was Jesus Christ. This extraordinary claim was not fea-
tured in the headline of his article the next day ("Prosecutor Asks
Broader Inquiry in Trial of Agca"), nor in the first paragraph of the
text, although the day before (with Sterling's collaboration") Tagliabue
had stressed Agca's credibility as the key issue in the case. Immediately
after noting Agca's self -identification as Jesus, Tagliabue hastened to

29. Articles by Sterling on the trial appeared in the New York Times of May 27, 1985
(the opening date of the trial) and on August 6. 1985

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

195

stress Agca's "thoughtful and measured account of how he obtained the
gun." It was still backup time, not bailout time. The trial next made the
front page on June 12, when Agca claimed to have heard that a Soviet
aide had paid money to have the Pope killed. On the other hand, when
the Pandico revelations appeared, providing something close to a
"smoking gun" for the coaching hypothesis, an article about that was
rather inconspicuously placed on page 5. 30 In the course of the latter arti-
cle, Tagliabue said that Ascoli Piceno prison, where Agca was housed,
is "notoriously porous." This symbolized the beginning of a shift from
backup to bailout time — the New York Times had never before thought
Agca's prison conditions were relevant to the case, and they had cer-
tainly never alerted their readers to the fact that Agca's prison was
"notoriously porous." But the case was becoming notably porous, and
the rats were getting ready to abandon ship.

Up to the recess of the trial in August 1985, however, Tagliabue es-
sentially held fast to the Sterling line, peddling Agca and his claims as
objective news. A number of elements of the Sterling perspective can be
traced in his reporting.

( 1 ) The Bulgarians and the Soviets had an adequate motive for the as-
sassination attempt based on Polish unrest and the Pope's opposition to
leftism in the Third World. No counterargument was ever suggested by
Tagliabue, and his news coverage tended to suppress incompatible facts
or claims. On June 7, for example, Judge Santiapichi asked Agca about
the note found on his person on May 13, 1981, which described the
shooting as a political act, a protest against "the killings of thousands of
innocent peoples by dictatorships and Soviet and American im-
perialism." Agca acknowledged that the note represented his views and
that he had acted for "personal motives." Michael Dobbs, writing in
the Washington Post, 31 pointed out that:

The note appeared to contradict his subsequent attempts to present himself as "a
terrorist without ideology" who had agreed to shoot the Pope in return for the
equivalent of Si. 2 million by the Bulgarian secret service. The mercenary mo-
tive has been accepted as accurate by an Italian stale prosecutor.

These themes were also central to Claire Sterling's analysis. John
Tagliabue in the New York Times failed to mention this exchange during

30. New York Times, June 17, 1985

31. "Agca Refuses to Testify on Accomplices," June 8, 1985.

196

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the trial. Similarly, in testimony given by Yalcin Ozbey on June 19, the
witness suggested that Agca's real motive in shooting the Pope was his
hunger for fame. This claim also never reached the readers of the Times.

(2) The case was an embarrassment to the Italian government, which
pursued it reluctantly . This classic Sterling line was pressed in the arti-
cle Tagliabue wrote jointly with Sterling on May 27, 1985. Characteris-
tically, no mention was made of any possible political benefits that
might have accrued to Craxi and others in bringing the case.

(3) No mention was made by Tagliabue or Sterling of P-2, Pazienza,
Ledeen, or Italian political conditions until after the Pandico bombshell.

(4) There was a steady reiteration of the Sterling cliche that Agca
"has not budged from his basic contention that Bulgarians, and thus the
Soviet Union, commissioned and financed the plot to murder the
Pope." 33 And this clich6 is not true. As noted above, Agca stated before
the Court on June 7, 1985, that he had acted for "personal" motives
with the intent of making a political protest, which contradicts the
mercenary hypothesis. Even more dramatic, on March 3, 1986, Agca
returned to the witness stand after a long absence, immediately after
Marini's summing up and request for dismissal of the case against the
Bulgarians, to reiterate the point he made in the letter threatening to
shoot the Pope in 1979: that he had committed his act because of the
crimes of western Christianity. "I thought I should strike at western
civilization and Christianity in the person of the Pope because they have
been repressive and oppressive of the people." In explaining his actions
of May 13, 1981, he made no mention of the Bulgarians or KGB. Tag-
liabue and the Times blacked out this statement.

(5) Tagliabue swallowed the signaling theory and Agca's "double
game." "By his own admission," wrote Tagliabue, Agca was playing
a double game, which seemed "to play into the hands of the defense at-
torneys" who claimed that Agca was coached." The use of "admis-
sion" we have already seen to be a manipulative device of the Sterling-
Henze school. Tagliabue does not say that Agca "admitted" he was
Jesus Christ. There are alternative explanations to the signaling theory;
Agca could be a crazy opportunist, in which case he is revealing his true
nature. The phrase "playing into the hands of" the Bulgarian defense
reflects Tagliabue's and the Times's identification with the case for the
prosecution.

(6) Tagliabue regularly understated the number of contradictions in
Agca's testimony. As Michael Dobbs wrote in the Washington Post:
"Agca has changed elements of his story almost continuously in the last

32. New York Times. August 6. 1985
33 Ibid., June 22. 1985.

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

197

four years. The session of the conspiracy trial yesterday, however, ap-
peared to set a record for the scale and rapidity of corrections offered by
Agca to earlier descriptions of the logistic^ of the assassination at-
tempt." 34 John Tagliabue, writing in the New York Times, was much
more circumspect.

(7) Tagliabue raised no questions about how Martella assembled a
case based on Agca's testimony, given the evidence accumulating in
court that Agca lied and contradicted himself on an hourly basis and suf-
fered from serious delusions.

(8) Following prosecutor Antonio Marini's recommendation on Feb-
ruary 27, 1986, that the Bulgarian defendants be acquitted for lack of
evidence, Tagliabue chose to feature heavily the prosecutor's attack on
the judge for failing to admit additional witnesses, and the fact that Ma-
rini called upon the jury to make its own decision."

The Times and the Disinformationists. We noted earlier that the New
York Times not only used Sterling as a reporter and source of data and
themes, it also suppressed inf ormation about her credentials. Her books
were regularly reviewed: The Time of the Assassins was reviewed in
both the daily and Sunday New York Times. Her reliance on Czech Gen-
eral Sejna, an established liar-informer, as a key source in The Terror
Network has never been disclosed to Times readers; and the slander suits
over her smearing of Henri Curiel were never mentioned in the Times.

Equally compromising has been the New York Times's alliance with
and protection of Michael Ledeen. Ledeen was given Op-Ed column

34. Washington Post, June 26, 1985.

35. "Rome Prosecutor Urges Acquittal of 3 Bulgarians," New York Times, February
28, 1986. Tagliabue pretended that there was a serious chance that the jury would override
the prosecutor and find the Bulgarians guilty, which was foolish and naive He also dis-
played the same kind of political naivete that we noted above under (2); Marini's rhetoric
was taken at face value, and Tagliabue never hinted at the possibility that the prosecutor
might be protecting his colleagues in the Italian establishment, who had initiated and
enthusiastically supported a case that was suffering such a dismal ending. Tagliabue of-
fered no analysis of the causes of the failure, despite the long record of claims by the New
York Times and its favored sources that Bulgarian guilt was all but proved. Apart from the
Marini gambit, Tagliabue blamed the denouement on Agca's undermining of the case,
without explaining why none of Agca's claims of Bulgarian involvement had ever been
confirmed by a single independent witness over the course of a four-year period of investi-
gation and trial.

198

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

space twice in 1984-85," allowing him to issue a call for the greater ap-
plication of force in Lebanon and to stress the greater importance of Na-
tional Security than individual liberty — themes that would delight the
heart of Licio Gelli. Ledeen's book Grave New World was given a sub-
stantial and favorable notice in the Sunday New York Times Book Re-
view.

Perhaps more serious has been the New York Times' 's cover-up of Le-
deen's role in Italy and his unsavory linkages to Italian intelligence and
the Italian Right. The Times has never mentioned his connections with
Santovito, Gelli, and Pazienza, 37 his controversial sale of documents to
SISMI, or the fact that the head of Italian military intelligence stated be-
fore the Italian Parliament that Ledeen was an "intriguer" and unwel-
come in Italy. 38 Actually, the Times's suppressions on Ledeen have been
part of a larger package of suppressions that excluded any information
that would disturb the hegemony of the Sterling-Henze line. Thus, just
as Sterling and Henze never mention P-2 in their writings, so the Times
failed even to mention the Italian Parliamentary Report on P-2 of July
12, 1984, which raised many inconvenient questions about the quality
of Italian society and the intelligence services. The Parliamentary Com-
mission, which held extensive hearings on SISMI (published in five vol-
umes), was also blacked out for readers of the Times. In July 1985 an
Italian court pronounced sentence against Francesco Pazienza and other
officials of SISMI for serious crimes. The accompanying 185-page re-
port described spectacular abuses of secret service authority in Italy, 39
including the forging and planting of documents. Although these crimes
were committed by individuals regularly linked in the Italian press to the
Bulgarian Connection, this report and sentence were also suppressed by
the Times. We believe that it is precisely this connection — and the fact
that these sensational documents would raise questions about Ledeen
and the Sterling-Henze portrayal of the Bulgarian Connection — that
caused the Times to avoid providing its readers with such information.

For years the Italian press carried reports of SISMI and Mafia in-
volvement in threatening and coaching Agca. The New York Times re-
frained from mentioning, let alone investigating, these matters. The first
reference to Pazienza in the Times came only with his arrest on March
24, 1985, and the article appeared in the Business Section of the paper.

36. Michael Ledeen, "Be Ready To Fight," Sew York Times. June 23, 1985; and
"When Security Preempts the Rule of Law," New YorkTimes, April 16, 1984

37. A minor exception is noted in the text below.

38. Maunzio De Luca, "Fuori I'intrigante." L Espresso , August 5, 1984.
39 See Chapter 4, pp. 00-000

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

199

The author, E. J . Dionne, never asked why Pazienza, wanted in Italy for
over a year, had never been extradited. He failed to mention that
Pazienza was wanted in Italy in connection with serious abuses by the
intelligence services, including involvement in the Bologna railroad sta-
tion bombing. When it came to Pazienza' s involvement with Michael
Ledeen, the reporter telephoned Ledeen, who told him that Pazienza
had exaggerated his influence with the Reagan administration, and that
he himself had had only a very brief, unspecified relation with Pazienza.
Dionne raised no questions and tapped no alternative information
sources. He had all the news fit to print.

From December 1982 through February 1986 the New York Times
featured heavily and almost exclusively claims of prosecutors and pro-
ponents of the Plot. After a long trial in which the claims of the pro-
secutor were once again explored in great detail, the prosecution rested
at the end of February, acknowledging its lack of an adequate case
against the Bulgarians by asking for a dismissal for lack of evidence. It
was finally the defense's turn to present its case. The Italian counsel for
Antonov took the floor March 4, and finished his presentation on March
8. His powerful statement, which assailed the Martella investigation
mercilessly, described in detail the evidential weakness of the case, and
gave powerful support to the coaching hypothesis, was blacked out in
the New York Times (and the rest of the mass media). This completes the
circle of propaganda service, with the preferred line pushed as long as it
could be issued as news without gross embarrassment, and then failing
to give the defense even minimal coverage, even after it is apparent to
all that the preferred line has been discredited. This process suggests the
unlikelihood that any retrospectives will be provided that might explain
the reasons for the failure — and the media's gullible and uncritical trans-
mission — of a case long portrayed as cogent and true.

The Small Voices of Dissent

There were serious voices of dissent in the mass media, but they were
few and without serious effect on the general run of media opinion and
reporting. The only major TV program to challenge the Sterling-Henze
line before the 1985 trial was an ABC-TV News "20/20" show on May
12, 1983. In that program ABC did some very remarkable and unique
things: It investigated the obvious leads and implausibilities in the Ster-
ling-Henze line with diligence, it went at it with an open and somewhat

200

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

skeptical view of the truth of the case, and it tapped a wide array of
sources. The results were devastating. It established from drug enforce-
ment officials that Agca's travels fit well into the pattern of movement
of the international drug trade. Citing Mumcu and others, it stressed
Agca's psychopathic personality and overweening desire to be in the
limelight. It effectively disposed of the alleged letter from the Pope to
Brezhnev, citing Cardinal Krol (a Vatican-appointed spokesman) and
other Vatican officials, who denied the existence of such a letter and
claimed that verbal messages from the Pope at the time were concilia-
tory. It pointed out the many ways in which the implementation of the
plot violated basic laws of spycraft (e.g., planning meetings in Bulga-
rian residences). It pointed up strategic errors in Agca's evidence (mis-
takes in describing Antonov's apartment, and the alleged presence of
Mrs. Antonov, who was in Sofia). It showed how Agca adjusted his tes-
timony to take account of Bulgarian counterclaims (e.g., pushing back
the meeting time with Antonov on May 13, given Antonov's strong alibi
for the originally "confessed" time). Examining the Bulgarian alibis,
ABC found them partly convincing. It discussed the problem of the lan-
guage barrier between Antonov and Agca. And it cited ABC's own in-
telligence and police contacts to cast doubts on the testimony of Man-
tarov and on the general validity of the case.

In brief, the ABC inquiry was an eye-opener, raising many questions
and providing partial and skeptical answers. Nevertheless, the pro-
gram's information fell still-bom from the tube. Although it received
powerful support from Agca's retractions one month later, the retrac-
tions were not leaked and publicized, and so did not strengthen the skep-
tical case. The Sterling-Henze line held firm in the mass media for
another year.

The most important dissenting voice in the mass media was that of
Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post's Rome correspondent, who
began to present an alternative and cautiously critical view following
Sterling's June 10, 1984 misrepresentation of the Albano Report. In a
series of articles beginning on June 18, 1984 — eight days after the
Times carried Sterling's rendition of Albano's Report — Dobbs began to
provide U.S. readers a second opinion. While featuring Albano's con-
clusion that the Bulgarians were behind the plot, Dobbs also noted in his
opening paragraph that the evidence was "largely circumstantial"; and
in the fifth paragraph he said that "much of the circumstantial evidence
. . . could undermine rather than confirm the conspiracy theory. . . . "
The remainder of Dobbs's lengthy article questioned Agca's reliability,

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

201

noted Agca's June 28, 1983 retraction of most of his previous declara-
tions, and presented evidence that appeared to undermine fatally the
Truck Ploy. A month later, on July 22, 1984, Dobbs returned to the at-
tack, noting in an article headlined "Probers Divided Over Evidence in
Pope Attack" that there were many loose ends in the case and that Agca
lacked credibility.

This was too much for Claire Sterling. In an Op-Ed column in the
Washington Post ("Taking Exception," August 7, 1984), Sterling ac-
cused Dobbs of "numerous omissions or misstatements." She alleged
"a curious ignorance of how this investigation developed," and main-
tained that "while Dobbs dwells on [Agca's] retraction," he failed to
take note that "practically everything Agca tried to take back had been
substantiated already, and not a single point in the retraction changed
the basic lines in Agca's story."

In a reply in the Post a fe w days later (August 10, 1 984), Dobbs noted
Sterling's "tendency to conclude that anybody who questions her thesis
that the assassination attempt has already been shown to be a Soviet-
bloc conspiracy is accepting Bulgarian arguments." But he dwelt
primarily on Sterling's essential dishonesty in failing to include in her
story that Albano's Report had raised the issue of Agca's "retractions"
of June 28, 1983. In a separate document, made available to readers on
request, he accused Sterling of omitting sections of the Report "that call
into question Agca's credibility." This document lists a further dozen
errors that Sterling made in her statement in the Post about Dobbs's re-
porting on the case, including clear misstatements of what Albano's Re-
port actually says. Later, in a four-part series in the Washington Post in
mid-October 1984, Dobbs relocated the root of the assassination attempt
in the Turkish right wing, raised severe doubts about Agca's credibility
and his allegations of working for the Bulgarians, and traced the evolv-
ing "confessions" to show that they were merely embellishments on a
first-approximation tale that was corrected by information learned from
the media and perhaps from the questions asked him by his inter-
rogators.

During the last half of 1984 and in the early phase of the 1985 trial
Michael Dobbs's writing on the Plot gave readers of the Washington
Post (and some subscribers to the Post's news service) a nearly unique
channel of information, providing a well-reasoned alternative to the
near tidal wave of pro-Plot outpourings from the publishers of Sterling,
Henze, and their allies. Dobbs raised many questions, pointed up
Agca's numerous lies and contradictions, and showed in a variety of

202

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ways the weaknesses of the Italian handling of the case. One of Dobbs's
chief contributions was to trace a large proportion of Agca's claims to
the Italian media, and to demonstrate the extensive access that Agca had
to outside information which would help him develop his claims and de-
clarations.

Despite these merits, Dobbs was unable to break free of the cliches
that Martella was "wise" and "judicious," and that the coaching
hypothesis was a "Bulgarian argument." 40 In his exchange with Ster-
ling, Dobbs was on the defensive, claiming that his own role was report-
ing "both sides, in contrast to Sterling." In the end this lone mass
media reporter, who had built up an impressive case against the Connec-
tion, was unable to state a firm conclusion. This is arguably reasonable;
a reporter can give the facts and let readers make up their own minds. In
the context, however, nobody in the mass media was drawing negative
conclusions on the Plot. Sterling, Henze, and their allies suffered no
such constraints. They were free to assert Bulgarian and Soviet guilt,
and even to denounce doubters as victims of Soviet disinformation. The
contrast tells us a great deal about the power of the political forces that
originated and sustained the case.

The Intellectuals: Somnolence and Complicity

Between 1982 and 1985, when the Bulgarian Connection became incor-
porated into the public's consciousness, the academic community re-
mained almost totally silent on the subject. Journals in the fields of
political science, international relations, and Near Eastern studies re-
cord only a single article on the Bulgarian Connection. Academic intel-
lectuals were content to allow this issue to be monopolized by the Big
Three and their allies at the Georgetown CSIS. While the academicians

40. As late as June 19,1 985, Dobbs was still asserting that "Soviet Bloc propagandists
and leftist Italian newspapers have claimed for some time that Agca was 'fed' in prison
with details on the Bulgarians he later accused of being his accomplices, but have so far
failed to provide convincing evidence to support their assertions." This reference to
"Soviet Bloc propagandists" is the same kind of Sterlingesque designation that Dobbs
objected to when applied to himself. Furthermore, il isn't even accurate. A fair number of
analysts not reasonably designated as "Soviet Bloc propagandists and leftist Italian news-
papers" have claimed that Agca was coached. What is "convincing evidence" is a matter
for debate, but Dobbs has never explained how Agca could have given details about An-
tonov's apartment that were never previously published and that Agca admitted he had
never seen.

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

203

were no doubt dealing with more important matters, they may also have
been constrained by the fact that the links between academic political
scientists, international relations specialists, conservative thinktanks,
and the federal government are extensive and pervasive. The silence of
the academy is evidence that these are to a great extent coopted disci-
plines, "handmaidens of inspired truth. '"" The Bulgarian Connection is
an inspired truth.

We mentioned earlier that Michael Ledeen's book Grave New World
was favorably reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
The reviewer, William E. Griffiths, a Professor of Political Science at
MIT, remarked parenthetically that "his [Ledeen's] discussion of the
probable Soviet involvement in the plot to kill the Pope is surely cor-
rect." 42 Griffiths gives no support for this statement. But Griffiths, who
is a "roving editor" for the Reader's Digest, is also on the Editorial
Board of Or bis, a semi-academic journal which carried the lone "schol-
arly" article on the plot. Perhaps this was the source from which Grif-
fiths deduced the validity of the Connection.

The "scholarly" article was published in Orbis in the Winter 1985
issue. Entitled ' 'The Attempted Assassination of the Pope, ' ' it was writ-
ten by Thomas P. Melady and John F. Kikoski, members of the faculty
of Sacred Heart University of Fairfield, Connecticut. 43 The most notable
feature of this piece is its complete and uncritical reliance on Claire
Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen as authorities on the subject.
The article is, in fact, a rehash of the works of these authors. Thirty-
three of 78 footnotes are to the works of the Big Three. A further 15
footnotes cite Sterling's version of the Albano Report. The remainder of
the citations range from NBC's Marvin Kalb and the Reader's Digest to
quotations from Henry Kissinger, Richard Pipes, and Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Michael Ledeen's Commentary article is described as "a
thorough treatment of media coverage of this affair and of the reluctance
of the 'elite media' to more actively pursue this story. . . . "** The au-

41 . See Robert A. Brady, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (New York:
Viking, 1937). Chapter 2, "Science, Handmaiden of Inspired Truth," described the
accommodation of German scientists to the social philosophy of the Nazi state.

42. New York Times Book Review, May 19, 1985.

43. Melady is also President of the University. He has been U.S Ambassador to
Burundi and Uganda and a Senior Adviser to the U.S. Delegation al the United Nations.

44. Thomas P. Melady and John F. Kikoski, "The Attempted Assassination of the
Pope," Orbis (Winter 1985), p. 777, n. 4. The Commentary article was incorporated into
Ledeen's book Grave New World. The contents of that chapter are discussed above in
Chapter 6.

204

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

thors cite the Albano Report as an authoritative and objective document,
and refer to its "exhaustive documentation" of various matters, al-
though they acknowledge never having read the Report. They rely on
Sterling's summary and her general inferences based on her own read-
ing of the document. 45 This lures them into citing at length Agca's "re-
markable details" on the Walesa plot and Antonov's apartment, oblivi-
ous to the fact that the Albano Report acknowledged that on June 28,
1983 Agca admitted that he had either concocted or knew only by hear-
say these "remarkable details."

The authors never cite Michael Dobbs's four-part critique of the pro-
secution's case, nor any other reporter or analyst with a different view-
point. When ABC-TV in 1983 checked the specifics of the Kalb-NBC
claim that the Pope had sent a warning note to Brezhnev, it came up
with sharply contradictory facts. 4 * Melady and Kikoski give the straight
Kalb-NBC version, never hinting that it had been disputed. Agca's
claims which Sterling and Henze selectively chose to fit their model are
also presented as valid, even where they have been retracted. Henze's
version of the alleged Soviet attempt to destabilize Turkey is presented
as uncontested truth — alternative facts and an alternative literature are
simply ignored. Henze's possible bias is suppressed and the authors
adopt Henze's own form of nondisclosure of his background — the
former CIA station chief in Turkey is said to have "a strong piior back-
ground in Turkish affairs, and presently is a research scholar [sic] with
the Rand Corporation."

Melady and Kikoski do not even take into consideration contrary evi-
dence from sources with which they are apparently familiar. For exam-
ple, they (along with Sterling and Henze) continue to rely on Nicholas
Gage's story about the Bulgarian defector Mantarov, long after the
Times' s foreign editor Craig Whitney had essentially conceded the truth
of the Bulgarians' denials and refutations of Mantarov's contentions.
The list of problems which the Orbis authors sidestepped by ignoring in-
convenient evidence is a long one, encompassing all those that would be
relevant to a work of serious academic scholarship. In short, Melady
and Kikoski provided the academic world with a Reader's Digest article
salted with a few footnotes. 47

45. "Sterling, who has read the as yet unreleased Albano Report in its entirety, wrote
that: 'Judicial belief in Mr. Agca's confession was apparently fortified by a mass of cor-
roborative evidence'." Ibid., p. 799.

46. See the discussion of the ABC program in the preceding section of this chapter.

47. That it was published by Orbis is revealing. Orbis is published by the Foreign Pol-

SEVEN: DISSEMINATION OF THE PLOT

205

The real function of articles like this Orbis production is their "echo
chamber" service. Relying entirely on Sterling and company, Melady
and Kikoski provide a nominally "scholarly article" confirming the
Sterling-Henze claims. This is now available for citation as scholarly
confirmation of the truth of the Sterling-Henze claims. 48 Thus Henze
cites this work in support of his own conclusions in his 1985 update of
The Plot to Kill the Pope, and it will undoubtedly provide others with a
respectable citation for the Sterling-Henze version of the story, despite
its wholly derivative and uncritical properties. Readers unfamiliar with
the "echo chamber" might conclude that Melady and Kikoski had
sifted evidence possibly unavailable to Henze, or that they had
examined competing hypotheses and come down on Henze's side.
Readers who have not read the Orbis article would have no way of
knowing that Henze, in citing Melady-Kikoski, is simply citing himself
(and Sterling) at second hand. Thus disinformation echoes through the
chamber to create the illusion of independent scholarly confirmation.

icy Research Institute, a conservative thinktank affiliated with the International Relations
program of the University of Pennsylvania. Its editorial board of 35 academics and
thinktank intellectuals includes 24 members currently on the staffs of universities, among
them William Van Cleave, Allen Whiting, Robert Scalapino, Paul Seabury, William Grif-
fiths, Richard Pipes. The thinktank members include Colin Gray of the Hudson Institute
and Lawrence B. Krause of the Brookings Institution. Presumably this article meets this
group's conception of scholarly standards.

48. A fine example of this process was the alleged admission by Khmer Rouge leader,
Khieu Samphan, that his government had slaughtered a million people. His statement was
reportedly made in an interview with a remote Italian journal, Famiglia Cristiana, in
1976. It is extremely doubtful that this interview ever took place, but translations and mis-
translations abounded. A mistranslation by John Barron and Anthony Paul of the Reader's
Digest was cited by Donald Wise in the Far Eastern Economic Review, which was then
cited by Professor Karl Jackson in Asian Survey as authentic evidence Jackson provided
the "scholarly" source to be cited further For a fuller discussion see Noam Chomsky and
Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of
Imperial Ideology (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 172-77

8. Conclusions

It is an important truth that "necessity is the mother of invention."
This was true of the Bulgarian Connection, which was needed by the
New Cold Warriors in the United States, by Craxi, Spadolini, Gelli,
Santovito, and the Vatican in Italy, and by others. Thus, as in the case
of many inventions, this one had multiple authorship. With the shooting
of the Pope on May 13, 1981, a number of different individuals im-
mediately knew in their hearts that the KGB did it — or ought to have
done it — and from several independent sources there soon emerged
claims that the KGB did do it.

The Bulgarian Connection as Western Disinformation

That the idea of the Bulgarian Connection was conceived early and
pushed by a number of independent sources, none of whom had any evi-
dence for the Connection, is one of several lines of accumulating evi-
dence pointing more and more conclusively to the Bulgarian Connection
as a product of both deliberate disinformation and some form of ma-
nipulation and coaching of the imprisoned Agca. It is now known, for
example, that the Italian secret service agency SISMI issued a document
on May 19, 1981 — within a week of the assassination attempt — which
claimed that the Plot had been announced by a Soviet official at a
gathering of the Warsaw Pact nations in Bucharest, Rumania, and that
Agca had been trained in the Soviet Union.' This report was pure disin-
formation, generated from within SISMI or supplied in whole or part
from some other intelligence source. It is an important document in two
respects: It shows that the idea of pinning the crime on the East came

I . The points summarized here are developed more f ully in Chapters 4 and S.

206

EIGHT: CONCLUSIONS

207

early to elements of the secret services, and it demonstrates their will-
ingness to forge or pass along false evidence on the Connection itself.

This forgery appeared as fact in the first book published on the Plot,
by a Vatican priest; and a Vatican official subsequently acknowledged
that the hypothesis of KGB-Bulgarian involvement in the shooting had
been secretly disseminated by the Vatican very soon after the event.
Furthermore, an official Catholic group in West Germany paid substan-
tial sums to a Gray Wolves member and friend of Agca to visit Agca in
prison and to persuade him to talk. 2 Testimony during the recent trial in
Rome also indicated that the West German police offered money and le-
niency to Oral Celik (through Yalcin Ozbey, held by the Germans in
prison) if he would agree to come to West Germany and help confirm
Agca's testimony. In short, the willingness to implicate the Bulgarians
and Soviets by disseminating lies and seeking to induce false witness by
western intelligence agencies and other political interests was displayed
early and often.

We also showed in Chapter 6 that the two primary U.S. sources on
the Bulgarian Connection, Claire Sterling and Paul Henze, have demon-
strated similar creative propensities in dealing with the subject. Paul
Henze is a long-time CIA professional and specialist in propaganda,
who has openly admitted impatience with demands for evidence when
dealing with hypothetical enemy crimes. 3 Both Henze and Sterling use
what has been called the "preferential method of research," which con-
sists of picking out those pieces of fact or claims that are "preferred"
for their argument and disregarding all others. Both have a strong pen-
chant for relying on the claims of badly compromised intelligence
sources and discredited defectors." Sterling's creativity — and lack of
scientific self -discipline — in dealing with the Bulgarian Connection is
shown in her response to Orsan Oymen's claim that Agca's lifelong and
extensive relations with the Gray Wolves must have had a bearing on his
actions. Her answer, that she "could not see how to reconcile that with
Agca's summer in Bulgaria," is revealing. His stay in Bulgaria, a thru-
way for Turkish migrants (and Gray Wolves), proves or suggests noth-
ing. But to one who knows the truth beforehand and employs the prefer-
ential method of research, it is a telling point.

Based on Agca's visit to Bulgaria in the summer of 1980, both Ster-

2. This plan was called off after i( was found thai Agca had already begun to talk. See
Chapter S, n. 3.

3. See Chapter 6, pp. 148-49.

4. See Chapter 6 and Appendix C.

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THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

ling and Henze saw an opportunity to create a Soviet Plot scenario. 5
Both were well funded, and they were generously received by the mass
media, despite their blemished credentials and demagogic arguments.
We believe that the Sterling-Henze model and the western media's
eager and uncritical acceptance of the Bulgarian Connection helped
shape the case in Rome. Sterling and Henze provided the basic scenario
adopted by both Agca and Martella, and the quick upsurge of popular
belief and political vested interest in the Plot gave the case an almost un-
stoppable momentum. Agca's guidance to a proper confession was en-
couraged and made more effective by the pre-packaged scenarios and
the already prepared groundwork of belief.

A second body of evidence suggesting that Agca was manipulated
and coached while in prison has been the accumulating data on P-2,
SISMI, Pazienza, and the Ledeen Connection. It has long been known
in Italy that the extreme Right — the "party of the coup" — has had an
important place in the military establishment and secret services. But a
spate of new evidence on these topics has surfaced in the past few years,
much of it highly relevant to the Bulgarian Connection. 6 This evidence
shows clearly the very important role that P-2 had assumed in the mili-
tary and intelligence services, the frequency with which elements of the
secret services have had cooperative relations with terrorists and the
Mafia, and their willingness to forge and plant documents to achieve
their political ends. There has also been considerable evidence of the in-
volvement of individuals with important links to the Reagan administra-
tion, notably Francesco Pazienza and Michael Ledeen, in the dubious
practices of the secret services.

A further set of evidence that has strengthened the case for coaching
has been the growing number of plausible claims of "smoking guns." 7
A Vatican official has named the prison chaplain Mariano Santini, who
was in close and regular contact with Agca, as a Vatican agent attempt-
ing to gel Agca to confess. (Santini was also close to the Mafia, and was
subsequently jailed as a Mafia emissary.) In 1983, Mafia official
Giuseppi Cilleri claimed that Francesco Pazienza had been visiting
Agca in prison and had given him detailed instructions on proper tes-
timony and identification of the Bulgarians. Agca's cell neighbor,
Giovanni Senzani, a Red Brigades terrorist who had rallied to the gov-

5. They may even have believed in the truth of their own creations, although this must
remain uncertain. Nobody has yet invented a sincereiometer.

6. See especially Chapter 4 above.

7. See especially Chapter 5 above.

EIGHT: CONCLUSIONS

209

emment, was in regular contact with Agca. He was familiar with the
photo album of Bulgarians from which Agca selected his alleged co-
conspirators (it had been used earlier in Senzani's own trial). Giovanni
Pandico, a former Mafia official and principal witness in the trial of
hundreds of Mafia personnel in Naples, provided details on just how
Agca was induced to talk by Mafia chief Cutolo, former SISMI official
Musumeci, and various others in the Ascoli Piceno prison. Francesco
Pazienza has denied the allegations of his own involvement in persuad-
ing Agca to "confess," claiming that he has been made the "fall guy"
for the actual perpetrators of the induced confession — other members of
SISMI whose names and role he spelled out. 8

These various threads of evidence show that there was an intent to im-
plicate the Bulgarians arising from several different sources, all of
whom had access to Agca in prison, and that the interested parties in the
Italian secret services and Vatican had no compunction about doctoring
evidence. There are also now a number of explicit statements that de-
scribe how and by whom Agca was prodded and coached. This aggre-
gate of evidence, when combined with the lack of any support for
Agca's frequently revised claims of Bulgarian involvement, leaves little
doubt that the Bulgarian Connection was a product of encouragement
and coaching.

We believe that the actual plot to kill the Pope — in contrast with the
plot to implicate the Bulgarians — arose from indigenous Turkish
sources. No other scenario yet advanced has comparable plausibility, let
alone such solid empirical support, as one based on Agca's link to the
Gray Wolves." The Gray Wolves' hostility to the Pope has demonstrable
ideological roots, although the actual shooting was very probably af-
fected by Agca's own psychological peculiarities and "Carlos com-
plex." 10 The Gray Wolves had links to some Bulgarians through the
smuggling trade, but they also had links to the CIA and numerous other
rightwing groups with whom they had more ideological compatibility. It
is our belief that none of these foreign connections had any direct bear-
ing on the assassination attempt.

8. See Diana Johnstone, "Bulgarian Connection: Finger-pointing in the pontiff plot
labyrinth," In These Times, January 29-February 4, 1986.

9. For details, see Chapter 3 above.

10. See Chapter 3, p. 56.

210

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

The Flaws in the Case From Its Inception

We have stressed throughout this book that the Bulgarian Connection
was never at any time supported by credible evidence or logic, and sur-
vived only by a tacit refusal of the western media to examine closely a
convenient political line. Let us recapitulate briefly a few of these fun-
damental flaws.

• The alleged Soviet "motive" — fear of the Pope's aid to Solidar-
ity — lacked plausibility from the beginning. Rational behavior would
have led the Soviet leadership to calculate that the Poles and West
would quickly attribute an assassination attempt to them even if it were
well covered. There was also every reason to anticipate that the effect of
an assassination attempt on the Poles would be adverse to Soviet inter-
ests (i.e., it would elicit rage and increased hostility). The purported
motive has also never been reconciled with the fact that Agca's threat to
murder the Pope in 1979 and the "deal" he allegedly struck with the
Bulgarians in Sofia in the summer of 1980 took place before Solidarity
even existed.

• A related "paradox" of Soviet involvement has also never been
satisfactorily resolved. That is, while the alleged plot was intended to
strengthen the Soviet's hand in dealing with Poland, as it worked out in
the real world the plot caused the Soviet Union severe propaganda dam-
age (even though the Pope was not killed and evidence of Soviet in-
volvement has not yet been produced). On the other hand, the Reagan
administration and western hard-liners have benefitted greatly from the
plot. On the Sterling-Henze model, the Soviets must be incredibly
stupid. On our model, in which the Bulgarian Connection was manufac-
tured by Sterling-Henze and U.S. and Italian officials, the source of the
plot and the resultant flow of benefits are comprehensible."

• According to Sterling, Henze, Marvin Kalb, Albano, and Martella,
the Soviet and Bulgarian secret police are highly efficient and try to
maintain "plausible deniability." This is incompatible with hiring an
unstable rightwing Turk, bringing him to Sofia for an extended stay,
and especially with arranging to have him supervised in detail by Bulga-
rian officials in Rome. Agca did visit Sofia, Bulgaria in 1980. In the

I 1 . In our analysis, the assassination attempt was a fortuitous event from the standpoint
of both East and West, but with the imaginative anticommunist Agca in an Italian prison,
the West was able to take advantage of this event — through the actions of SISMI and
Sterling and company — to construct a "second conspiracy."

EIGHT: CONCLUSIONS

211

Sterling-Henze analyses, this is a key fact showing Bulgarian guilt. But
if the KGB is smart and covers its tracks, concern over plausible denia-
bility would have caused them to go to great pains to keep Agca away
from Bulgaria. Thus, Agca's visit to Bulgaria provides the raw material
for creating a Bulgarian Connection only because a propaganda system
allows its principals to contradict themselves and one another virtually
without challenge. The Keystone Kops arrangements outlined by Agca
involving Bulgarian officials in Rome would have been laughed off the
stage by NBC or the New York Times — if this propaganda show had
been put on in Moscow.

• As pointed out by Michael Dobbs, "Agca can be shown to have
lied literally hundreds of times to judges both in his native Turkey and in
Italy.'" 2 Orsan Oymen estimates some 115 changes in testimony by
Agca recorded in the Martella Report. Agca withdrew significant parts
of "confessions," which he admitted were based on outside assistance
or produced out of thin air. As Agca was for all practical purposes the
sole witness in the case, Martella's decision to proceed to a trial in the
face of this self-destruction of credibility reflected a broken-down judi-
cial process.

• The Sterling-Henze-Martella school referred frequently to Agca's
testimony as having been "independently confirmed." This assumed a
properly managed investigation of Agca's claims. But Martella con-
ceded a lack of control over or knowledge of Agca's visitors in prison,
and we have seen that Agca's outside contacts were extensive. Further-
more, Martella's presumption of the validity of Agca's primary allega-
tions 13 injected an additional element of impropriety into the process of
confirming Agca's claims. Given the high probability that Agca was fed
information by individuals in SISMI and elsewhere in the Italian prison-
intelligence-political- judicial network, "independent confirmation" has
to be taken with a grain of salt.

• Not a single witness was produced in more than three years of in-
vestigations and trial to support any Agca claim of a contact with Bulga-
rians, in Rome or anywhere else, although his supposed meetings and
travels with them were frequent and in conspicuous places. The car al-
legedly hired by the Bulgarians in Rome for the assassination attempt
has never been traced. The large sum of money supposedly paid by the
Bulgarians for the shooting has never been located or traced.

12. "A Communist Plot to Kill the Pope — Or a Liar's Fantasy," Washington Post,
November 18, 1984.

13. See Chapter 5, pp. 1 14-17.

212

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

• With one exception, every proven transaction by Agca, from his
escape from a Turkish prison in 1979 to May 13, 1981, including all
transfers of money or a gun, was with a member of the Gray Wolves. 14

• The photographic evidence of May 13, 1981, one of the bases on
which Martella arrested Antonov, collapsed long ago. Martella eventu-
ally asserted that the photograph allegedly showing Antonov on the
scene was actually that of a tourist, not Antonov, and the matter was
dropped. But this tourist has never been located by independent re-
searchers, and the photo of Antonov in St. Peter's Square is a remarka-
bly exact likeness, requiring a phenomenal coincidence. An alternative
hypothesis is that the photo of Antonov was faked. 15 In the Lowell New-
ton photograph, the individual fleeing from the scene, originally iden-
tified by Agca as the Bulgarian "Kolev," was later identified as Agca's
Gray Wolves friend Oral Celik. 16 It is thus possible that Martella was
lured into arresting Antonov by a combination of a fabricated Antonov
likeness and one of Agca's lies, which together placed two Bulgarians in
St. Peter's Square at the time of the shooting. Martella's gullibility quo-
tient on claims of Bulgarian guilt was unflagging up to the submission
of his final Report.

• The formal photo identification of Bulgarians by Agca on
November 8, 1982, put forward by Martella and the media as compel-
ling evidence of Bulgarian involvement, was rendered meaningless by
the statement of Minister of Defense Lagorio on the floor of the Italian
Parliament that Agca had already identified the Bulgarian photos two
months previously. The dramatic photo show was thus almost surely a
staged rerun of a prior briefing and "identification." It should be recal-
led that Agca took seven months after deciding to "come clean" before
naming a single Bulgarian. 17

14. The exception was that he apparently received a small sum of money from Mersan,
who was acting as a courier for Ugurlu. Given Ugurlu's ties with the Gray Wolves, and
perhaps even Turkish intelligence, this single exception to the Gray Wolves pattern will
hardly bear the weight given it by Sterling-Henze, who claimed that it removes Agca's
crime from a Gray Wolves context and points the finger of guilt at the Bulgarian-Turkish
Mafia. We argued in Chapter 3 that these links took place within the larger framework of
the activities of the Nationalist Action Party and the Gray Wolves.

15. For a discussion of the ease with which Antonov's face could have been inserted
into the crowd by a computerized photo-editing machine widely used in the publishing
and advertising industries, see Howard Friel, "The Antonov Photo and the Bulgarian
Connection," CovertAclion Information Bulletin, Number 21 (Spring 1984), pp. 20-21.

1 6 . The trial in Rome raised doubts about this second identification, and the true iden-
tity of the fleeing individual is uncertain

17 See Chapter 5, pp. 110-11. for a further discussion of this photo identification

EIGHT: CONCLUSIONS 213

Conclusion: The Lessons and Future of the Bulgarian
Connection

The history of the Bulgarian Connection illustrates well the role of the
mass media as a servant of power. The New Cold Warriors were look-
ing hard for a basis on which to assail the Evil Empire in 1 98 1 , and the
shooting of the Pope and the incarceration of Agca in an Italian prison
offered them a marvelous propaganda opportunity. The mass media per-
formance, from the time of Sterling's Reader's Digest article in August
1982 up to the time of the trial, allowed that propaganda opportunity to
be fully realized." As we have seen, in dealing with the Bulgarian Con-
nection the major U.S. media violated norms of substantive objectivity"
in several ways:

(1) They used as primary sources individuals with badly tarnished
credentials, and failed to provide adequate disclosure of their back-
grounds and affiliations.

(2) Although the Sterling-Henze analysis and Agca's claims were not
supported by independent evidence, were logically faulty, and were
ludicrous in their shifting James Bond scenarios and blatant ideological
underpinning, 20 they were not subjecteo co critical scrutiny. Instead they
were passed along as "news" even when they were displacing and con-
tradicting earlier versions of the "news."

(3) The media "played dumb" on a variety of important issues, such
as Agca's prison conditions, the belatedness of his confession, the pos-
sibilities of coaching, and the massive violations of "plausible deniabil-
ity" in the Plot.

(4) The media also played dumb on the Italian and Cold War context,
and suppressed information on a whole string of Italian parliamentary
and court reports on the abuses of the intelligence services. Attention to
these issues and documents would have raised serious questions about

18. As we point oul in Chapter 7. Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post and ABC-TV
provided partial exceptions to this generalization, but they were relatively insignificant in
the total coverage of the case.

19. Nominal objectivity may be met by reporting verbatim a statement by Claire Ster-
ling or George Shultz; substantive objectivity would require, among other things, an as-
sessment of whether the quoted statement was true or false before it was transmitted as rel-
evant "news." Bias is also displayed in the selection of only those authorities and state-
ments that the joumalisl-editor-publisher likes to reward with publicity

20 See Chapter 2, on "The Challenges to the Disinformalionists "

214

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

the Italian judicial process and the validity of the Sterling-Henze line.

In brief, by their gullibility and failure to ask obvious questions the
mass media played a central role in allowing a propaganda theme full
and uncontested reign. With their cooperation an implausible piece of
disinformation was passed off on the public as a truth for more than
three years. 21

With the case for a Bulgarian Connection dismissed by an Italian
court following a lengthy trial, can not be said truth and justice have
been finally vindicated? The answer is no. We have shown in this book
that the Bulgarian Connection is a myth. The court has acquitted for
lack of evidence rather than for innocence, making the rectification only
partial. The court also has left open an avenue through which the west-
em disinformationists and media can continue to suggest that the Bul-
garian Connection was valid but simply could not be proved because of
"political constraints" on the pursuit of the case." The western media
foisted the myth of the Connection on the public aggressively and un-
critically over a three-year period. That myth can only be ousted from
the popular mind by a campaign of substantial intensity and duration.
But no such campaign will take place. In fact, our forecast is that the
loss of the case will be reported briefly and the subject will then be
dropped. There will be no extended analyses or retrospectives on how
the media sold the public a bill of goods, nor will there be editorials on
the corruption involved in uncritical reliance on disinformationists and a
coached witness to serve the New Cold War.

21 . Herbert Cans contends that "the rules of news judgment call for ignoring story im-
plication." and that journalists follow such rules. The personal values of journalists "are
left at home," he tells us. and "the beliefs that actually make it into the news are profes-
sional values that are intrinsic to national journalism and thai journalists learn on (he job."
"Are Journalists Dangerously Liberal?," Columbia Journalism Review, November-De-
cember 1985, pp. 32-33. We would submit that Gans's assertions are completely incom-
patible with the history of news coverage of (he Bulgarian Connection.

22. As we noted in the Preface, the disinformationists stress "political" factors any-
time they lose. The dominant political forces at work in Italy, however, are strongly pro-
western (as described in Chapter 4), and western preconceptions and power played an im-
portant part in bringing the Bulgarian Connection into existence in the first place We be-
lieve that the failure of the irial to exonerate fully the Bulgarians reflects similar political
bias. In addition to normal western suspicion of the communist powers, we believe that
there was an unwillingness to repudiate completely the Italian judges and prosecutors and
other western interests with a large stake in the Connection. Dismissal for lack of evidence
frees the victims, while affording some measure of solace and protection to the establish-
ment interests that originated and pushed the case.

EIGHT: CONCLUSIONS

215

Instead of Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen being discredited by the trial
and dismissal of the case, we believe that they will be given the floor
once again to explain it away. With their rationalizations, and with few
critical retrospectives, not only will the disinformationists and the mass
media come out of this affair smelling like roses, the Bulgarian Connec-
tion itself will be salvaged. It will perhaps be quietly placed on the back
burner for a while, but the myth has entered popular consciousness by
intense and indignant repetition, and it will take on renewed life after
memories of the upsetting trial are dimmed.

Looking at the international dimension, the West and the western
mass media were guilty of a huge fraud, with Bulgaria and the Soviet
Union subjected to an intense and effective multi-year propaganda cam-
paign based on false evidence. With the dismissal of the case, will the
West now suffer a severe propaganda blow and will the Soviets and Bul-
garians recoup some of their losses? We believe that this will not hap-
pen: U.S. and western power and media domination are so great that lies
can be institutionalized as myths and can remain effective even after ex-
posure." If you are strong enough, just as you are never a "terrorist"
but only "retaliate" to the terror of others, so there is no such thing as a
losing propaganda campaign. In the words of Alexander Pope: "Des-
troy his sophistry: in vain — The creature's at his dirty work again."

23 The history of the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner 007 in 1 983 provided
an object lesson and answer. The day after the event, the United States organized a huge
propaganda campaign based on the claim that the Soviets had knowingly murdered 259 ci-
vilians Five weeks later, the CIA acknowledged that the Soviets had not realized that the
plane was a civilian carrier, ("U.S. Experts Say Soviet Didn't See Jet Was Civilian,"
New York Times, October 7, 1983.) As that information was surely available to U.S offi-
cials within hours of the downing, it is clear that the United Stales suppressed crucial in-
formation to allow it to conduct a propaganda barrage Following the revelation that the
Soviet Union had not recognized that it was shooting down a civilian plane, there were no
discernible criticisms of the United States for its propaganda assault based on disinforma-
tion, and Soviet villainy in the case has been institutionalized. See Edward S. Herman.
"Gatekeeper Versus Propaganda Models: A Case Study," in Peter Golding, Graham
Murdock, and Philip Schlesinger, eds , Communicating Politics: Essays in Memory of
Philip Elliott (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1986)

Appendices

A. Did the Western Media
Suppress Evidence of a
Conspiracy?

Claire Sterling maintains in The Time of the Assassins that western
governments and the western media quickly backed away from the
initial statements of Italian government officials that the assassination
attempt on Pope John Paul II was the result of a conspiracy In the open-
ing lines of her book. Sterling says that "for but a fleeting instant, the
truth was close enough to touch . . , and then it was gone.'" While
space does not allow us to discuss each instance of the misuse of evi-
dence which characterizes Ms. Sterling's book from beginning to end,
as the alleged media coverup of a conspiracy is her opening theme, an
analysis of that claim provides a valuable case study of the quality of her
work.

As we noted in Chapter 2, the conspiracy initially perceived by the
western media was a Turkish one. Rather than quickly backing off from
any investigation into a Soviet-backed conspiracy, as Sterling main-
tains, the western media vigorously pursued the abundant evidence that
Agca had been aided and sheltered by his colleagues in the Gray
Wolves. While the western media can rightly be accused of many
things, to say that it did not immediately provide its readers with details
about a possible conspiracy in the attempt on the Pope's life is absurd,
though tactically of great value to Sterling in her efforts to portray her-
self as a misunderstood seeker after the real truth, the Bulgarian Con-
nection.

To demonstrate this point, we will summarize the coverage which the
unfolding investigation received in the New York Times and the
Washington Post for the period from May 14 — the day after the assassi-
nation attempt — to May 25. By this latter date Agca had ceased to pro-

1 . Claire Sterling, The Time of the Assassins (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1983), p 5.

216

APPENDIX A

217

vide his captors with any fresh leads; and on May 25 the New York
Times provided its readers with a long, summary article which brought
the various threads of the investigation together. Our recounting of this
coverage by two of the leading U.S. newspapers will serve two pur-
poses. First, it provides us with what might be called a preliminary
paradigm, a well-textured first draft of what we call the First Conspir-
acy. (We elaborate on the background of the First Conspiracy in Chap-
ter 3.) Second, from this summary it will be evident that, contrary to
Sterling, the most casual reader of these newspapers in the first weeks
after the papal assassination attempt would have been overwhelmed by
information about Agca's background in Turkey, and by speculation
about the involvement of the Gray Wolves in his attempt on the Pope.

• May 14, 1981: In its initial report on the assassination attempt, the
New York Times noted Agca's background in Turkey and his earlier
threat to kill the Pope. The front-page article connected Agca with the
Nationalist Action Party. The Washington Post, in a long article by its
Turkish correspondent Metin Munir, probed Agca's Turkish back-
ground, focusing on his association with the Gray Wolves and his re-
sponsibility for the murder of the Turkish newspaper editor Ipekci. 2

• May 15, 1981: The lead article in the New York Times, by R. W.
Apple, Jr., was headlined "Police Trace the Path of the Suspect from
Turkey to St. Peter's Square." Once again the Times noted Agca's con-
nections to the Nationalist Action Party and the failure of the interna-
tional police to arrest Agca when Turkey had requested it. 1 A second ar-
ticle on the 15th of May, contained the words quoted by Sterling as
suggesting that the Italian authorities had abandoned the search for any
conspiracy: "Police are convinced, according to government sources,
that Mr. Agca acted alone." This article, without a by-line, focused on
the Pope's medical condition and was printed on the inside pages. Even

2. The London Times focused its article on the Pope's attacker on the Ipekci assassina-
tion and his subsequent letter threatening to kill the Pope in 1979 It described Agca as
"without doubt the most wanted Turkish terrorist.'' and quoted Turkish authorities com-
plaining that West European governments had repeatedly ignored the Turkish govern-
ment's warnings that Agca was in their country and its requests that Agca be arrested.

3. Interestingly, R. W. Apple, Jr. quoted from a letter purportedly found on Agca's
person after his arrest — in which he claimed that "I, Agca, have killed the Pope so that
the world may know of the thousands of victims of imperialism" — and then went on to
describe this as "language that seemed to support his assertion that he was not part of an
international plot." The full text of the letter protests against U.S. intervention in El Sal-
vador and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. These sentiments are perfectly compatible
with the ideology of the Gray Wolves, as we discuss in Chapter 3.

218

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

this peripheral aside, however, was followed with the observation that
' 'police do not exclude the possibility that Mr. Agca was backed by an
organization and had the help of friends in some of the countries that he
had visited since escaping from a Turkish prison in November 1979." 4

The Washington Post of May 15 included an article by Metin Munir
headed "Turk Describes Suspected Gunman as Determined, Highly
Trained.' " The Turk in question was Hasan Fehmi Gunes, a former
Minister of the Interior in Turkey at the time when Agca was arrested
for killing Ipekci. According to Gunes, "We know he [Agca] was ex-
treme Right because we know that the people who gave him money and
arms and helped him in his crime were extreme rightwing." To this arti-
cle were appended reports from Turkey and West Germany that elabo-
rated on Turkish efforts to apprehend Agca and the apparent lack of
cooperation they received from West Germany and other countries. The
report quoted a Frankfurt journalist who specialized in the activities of
rightwing Turks in West Germany. He recounted the attempt of a 60-
man squad of Turkish police to track Agca down there, "but it was
given little support by German police and did not find him."

• May 16, 1981: The Times' % article noted the conviction of the Ital-
ian press — both leftwing and rightwing — that the Pope was the victim of
an international plot. It also quoted the issue of La Stampa cited by
Sterling in which magistrate Luciano Infelisi said, "As far as we're con-
cerned, documents prove that Agca did not act alone. He is a killer en-
listed by an international group with subversive aims." The Times' 's ar-
ticle went on to detail the Turkish background of Agca's false passport,
noting that this fact "was just one suggesting links with Turkish politi-
cal groups." A second front-page article, by the Times' s Turkey corre-
spondent Marvine Howe, was headed ' 'Turks in Disagreement on Mo-
tive of Alleged Assailant." The debate described in the article pitted
some Turks who claimed that Agca was simply a psychopath and had
acted alone against Gunes and others who pointed to Agca's extensive
ties to the Gray Wolves, and who argued that the assassination attempt
was almost certainly based in such a conspiracy. An article on the inside
pages of the Times by John Tagliabue gave many details of apparent
sightings of Agca in West Germany, and of Agca's alleged ties to the
many branches of the Gray Wolves in West Germany.

The Washington Post for May 16 headed its main front-page story
"Wider Plot Is Probed in Papal Attack." In it Sari Gilbert reported from

4. Given (his language, it is entirely possible that the words "acted alone" related sim-
ply to the events in St. Peter's Square, and may well be true.

APPENDIX A

219

Rome on Infelisi's contention that, because of Agca's well-financed and
extensive travels, "we have ruled out the theory that this was a gesture
of an isolated madman' 1 ; but Infelisi also said "he still was 'not con-
vinced' that there was an international conspiracy." Gilbert noted that
Agca claimed he had received his assassination weapon in Bulgaria, but
quickly pointed out that Italian police had been able to trace the murder
weapon from the Belgian factory where it was made, following its path
first to Switzerland and then to Italy. An inside-page article by the
Post's Turkey correspondent included an interview with Agca's brother
Adnan, who said that his brother "hoped to win world fame and a place
at the head of the Moslem world. " "If they torture or spiritually oppress
my brother," Adnan said, "the whole Islamic world will flock to his
side. The crusaders are against the entire Islamic world." The Post's
correspondent again noted Turkey's irritation that other countries were
so unwilling to cooperate with the martial law government in its attempt
to have the many convicted terrorists who had escaped its borders re-
turned to Turkey. The Post also noted that several Gray Wolves had
been arrested in connection with Agca's passport fraud, a story given a
headline and much bigger play in that same day's London Times.

• May 17, 1981: On this date, Sunday, the front-page article in the
New York Times was headlined, "Police Lack Clues to Foreign Links of
Suspect in Shooting of the Pope." The burden of the article, however,
was the near-universal acceptance of the idea that some kind of conspir-
acy lay behind Agca's attempt on the Pope, contrasted with the disap-
pointing results of efforts by the police to f ind clues. "The assertion that
Mr. Agca was unquestionably the agent of an international conspir-
acy," claimed the Times, "has spread around the world in the last 48
hours, and official statements of caution seem powerless to counter the
impression that terrorists in Europe and the Middle East plotted to assas-
sinate the Pope." The article went on to trace the debate in the Italian
press over the nature and extent of the conspiracy, and cited La
Stampa's story that Italian investigators believed "Mr. Agca may have
been financed and supported by friends belonging to rightwing groups
in the large Turkish communities in Western Europe, particularly in
West Germany, rather than by a network of international terrorist or-
ganizations."

The debate within Italy was clearly not whether Agca was part of a
conspiracy, but what kind of conspiracy stood behind the assassination
attempt. What some Italian officials seemed to be backing away from
was the idea that Agca was linked to a network of international ter-

220

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

rorists, a la Carlos the Jackal. The view that Agca's conspiracy was
most likely a Turkish one received support from an article by Marvine
Howe on an inside page of the Times headlined ' 'Turk Is Called a Prod-
uct of Violence in His Nation." Sari Gilbert, in the Washington Post,
noted that the police now believed that the man seen running away from
the scene of the crime might be Agca's long-time Turkish comrade,
Mehmet Sener. (The London Sunday Times pursued the same theme in a
long article, "The Wolf Who Stalked A Pope," which traced Agca's
terrorist record in Turkey.)

• May 18, 1981: On this, the fifth day after the assassination attempt,
the New York Times had a front-page article by Marvine Howe which
was headed, "Turks Say Suspect in Papal Attack is Tied to Rightist
Web of Intrigue . ' ' This was the longest exposition to date of Agca's ties
to Turkey's neofascist Right. Howe drew on the recently released in-
dictment of the Nationalist Action Party, the parent organization of the
Gray Wolves, to provide readers with some background analysis. The
article focused on the Western European branches of the Gray Wolves,
or "Idealists," which led Howe to state that "it is not difficult to imag-
ine how he [Agca] could have traveled widely in Europe and evaded the
authorities." She also noted that the martial law prosecutors of the
Nationalist Action Party had found links between the party and the West
German secret service. The Washington Post noted that "Italian magis-
trates are so convinced that the Turkish terrorist is connected to a right-
wing organization that yesterday they assigned five Roman judges who
are specialists in Italian right-wing subversive groups to the team carry-
ing out his interrogation."

Also on this day both the Times and the Post discussed the way that
Agca was standing up to interrogation. The Times's article noted Agca's
"refusal to answer key questions," while the Post said that Italian
police were describing Agca as "tough and cool, a professional terrorist
who has not yet shown any sign of breaking down under the pressure of
interrogation." Both the press and the police were realizing that Agca
had provided investigating authorities with an abundance of information
about himself, but that only some of it was true and none of it concerned
his Gray Wolves associations or any assistance he was given between
his escape from a Turkish prison and his assassination attempt. Sari Gil-
bert of the Post noted that "Agca has given the police a six-page deposi-
tion in which he is reported to have admitted initial close ties to a right-
wing movement in Turkey, but to have added that he subsequently con-
verted to Marxism at a Palestinian base in Syria. ' ' This is apparently the

APPENDIX A

221

same report around which Claire Sterling framed her Reader's Digest
article some 15 months later; but "Italian investigators," noted Gilbert,
"seem to feel there was never any such conversion. 'He is trying to
further muddy already murky waters,' one of them was quoted by news
agencies as saying here today."

• May 19, 1981: The Washington Post's main headline on the front
page announced that the "Italian Police Seek 2nd Suspect." They (ap-
parently erroneously) identified this second suspect as Mehmet Sener,
evidently on the basis of the Lowell Newton photograph, which had
been provided to the Italian police. The police were also reportedly
looking for "Oral Gelik" [sic], described as "another Turkish right-
wing extremist." The declaration that the Italian police were looking for
a second suspect "seemed to lend weight to the growing conviction in
some circles that there was a conspiracy against the Pope's life and that
a terrorist organization was behind it." But the Post's reporter also
noted that the head of DIGOS, the special antiterrorist police, "took a
more cautious approach," and that according to this source Agca "may
have been a hired killer, or he may not have been. As for an interna-
tional conspiracy, it's a very remote possibility." In an article on the in-
side pages — "Probe of Turkish Right Links Pope Suspect" — the Post
followed the Times's lead of the previous day in using material from the
indictment of the NAP to trace Agca's ties to Turkey's neofascist Right.
For its part the Times reported from Bonn that ' 'Germany Finds No Evi-
dence Accused Turk Lived Here." The Times's reporter, John Tag-
liabue, also drew on the NAP indictment to ask questions of West Ger-
man officials about Agca's links to any of the NAP's European branch-
es; but they said there was no evidence that Agca had ever been in West
Germany.

• May 20, 1 98 1 : The focus of the western media turned to some re-
marks Agca apparently made during his interrogation on May 18, in
which he claimed that he had considered killing other world leaders, in-
cluding the Queen of England and the Secretary General of the United
Nations. "I went to London to kill the King," the police quoted Agca as
saying, "but I found he was a woman and decided against it because 1
am Turkish and a Moslem and I don't kill women." For the same
reason, he added, "I did not kill Simone Weil, the President of the
European Parliament, after I had been to Brussels to study how the
Community works." The Washington Post report claimed that Agca's
statement "lefthis interrogators highly skeptical about its veracity"; but
R. W. Apple, Jr. of the New York Times apparently considered this

222

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

statement food for thought, saying that it "lent credence to the thesis that
Mr. Agca's views are essentially anarchistic, growing out of a hatred of
authority, rather than conventionally leftwing or rightwing." The Lon-
don Times, meanwhile, quoted British authorities who denied that Agca
had ever set foot in Britain.

• May 21, 198 1 : The Times's correspondent John Tagliabue reported
from Bonn on "Militant Views Among Turks Trouble Bonn." The re-
port surveyed the West German government's fears about the large Tur-
kish "guest worker" population, and focused on the activities of right-
wing organizations there.

The Washington Post story on this day was headed, "Interrogation of
Agca Turns Up Several Baffling Mysteries." This article summarized
what was known and not known about Agca and his travels before
shooting the Pope, and stressed the general bafflement of the police of
several Western European countries in the Agca case. Apparently for
the first time a possible Bulgarian Connection was proposed. The Post
quoted a "high-ranking Italian official" who noted that Agca had
passed through Bulgaria after escaping from Turkey. According to this
hypothesis, continued the Post story, "the Bulgarians might be upset
enough by the alternative to communism evolving in Poland and the
strong backing of the Catholic Church, as well as of the Polish Pope, to
the Solidarity independent union movement to encourage Agca in his
endeavor. . . . " The Post story did not give this hypothesis much cre-
dence, however, quickly quoting a "western diplomatic source" who
called this theory "off the wall."

• May 22, 1981: The Times's report for this day was quite short and
was printed on the inside pages. It described Agca's transfer from police
headquarters to Rebibbia prison, just outside of Rome. The story's
headline reflected Agca's shouted remark to reporters that he was
"sorry for the two foreign tourists [who had been wounded] but not for
the Pope." The story also noted that Agca had been interrogated by
police for more than 75 hours over the past 9 days.

A much longer story in the Washington Post, datelined Malatya, Tur-
key, was headed, "Accused Turk Looked for Exit From Poverty." It
traced Agca's life from its beginnings in extreme poverty through his as-
sassination of Abdi Ipekci in 1979. The article noted that Malatya had
been a center of the opium trade, and that the region had suffered se-
verely, when the trade was suppressed in the early 1970s. The article
also noted the profound effect on the Malatya region of the formation of
the coalition government in 1976, which was headed by the conserva-

APPENDIX A

223

tive Justice Party and included the Nationalist Action Party, and quoted
local sources as saying that Agca had been frequently seen in the com-
pany of the Gray Wolves. Finally, the article described the wave of
rightwing terrorism which resulted in more than 700 shops owned by
leftists being bumed or looted in 1978, following the murder of the local
Justice Party chief. This outbreak resulted in the proclamation of martial
law for the Malatya region, the first Turkish province to be put under
control of the Army.

• May 23, 1981: The Times' s story, by Marvine Howe, followed the
lead of the Post's story of the day before "Turk's Hometown Puzzled
by His Climb to Notoriety." The article included interviews with
Agca's brother and mother (as had the Post's story the previous day);
but despite his mother's disclaimer that Agca was ' 'good and honest and
brilliant, just an ordinary boy," Howe quoted "political sources that in-
sisted that Mehmet Ali Agca was associated with extreme rightwing or-
ganizations known as Idealist Clubs" [the Gray Wolves]. The article
also noted that Agca's high school had been taken over in 1975 by the
Nationalist Action Party, "naming one of their prominent members as
director and filling the staff with militants. Seminars were held on fas-
cism and Nationalist Action Party principles, which were basically anti-
foreign, anti-West, and militantly nationalistic."

The Washington Post for this day contained only a short report on the
Pope's continuing recovery.

• May 24, 1981: Once again, the Post's comments were restricted to
a medical note that the Pope was now out of danger The Times focused
on Agca's European travels, again highlighting claims by Turkey that
European governments had failed to cooperate with their earlier requests
for Agca's arrest and extradition. In the "Review of the Week" section,
the Times noted that "Questions Continue," particularly those connect-
ing Agca to the Nationalist Action Party and the "Idealist Associa-
tions" of Western Europe.

• May 25, 1981: By this date the broad outlines of the preliminary
paradigm of the case had been established, and both newspapers pre-
pared summary articles. The Post headlined their contribution, "Tur-
key, Searching for Modernity, Offers Fertile Field for Terrorism." It
portrayed Agca as a product of the rapid social and economic changes
which were drawing Turkey into the modem world economy, while
leaving backwaters like Agca's hometown of Malatya to suffer in pov-
erty. For its part, the Times wrapped up its coverage of this phase of the
case with a very long article by R. W. Apple, Jr. , which began on the

224

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

front page ("Trail of Mehmel Ali Agca: 6 Years of Neofascist Ties")
and filled up an entire inside page as well. Apple rooted Agca solidly in
Turkey's neofascist Right, and traced his involvement with the Gray
Wolves and rightwing terrorism from his high school days, through his
brief university career, and then on to greater things. Apple found
Agca's motivation puzzling, still stumbling over Agca's claim that he
thought of killing most of the crowned heads of Europe; but he also
quoted Turkish sources who believed that Agca was mentally unbal-
anced and aspired after greatness or notoriety. Finally, the article gave a
detailed account of Agca's wanderings through Western Europe, shel-
tered by the Gray Wolves and completely unhampered by the conti-
nent's police forces.

Summary

It should by now be abundantly clear that it is impossible to subscribe to
Claire Sterling's assertion that, for but a fleeting moment, the possibil-
ity of a conspiracy was a "truth close enough to touch," and that this
truth was suppressed by western governments and the western media in
the interests of preserving detente. On the contrary, the western media
vigorously pursued the clues that there was a Turkish-based, rightwing
conspiracy which connected Agca through a multitude of threads to the
Nationalist Action Party and the Gray Wolves. The distortion perpe-
trated by Sterling at the opening of her book is characteristic of her han-
dling of all evidence, perhaps because of her confidence that the major
media outlets of the West are content to rely on her testimony, without
even examining the files of their own newspapers.

b. Bulgaria and
the Drag Connection

Taking advantage of Bulgaria's sudden prominence in Ihe western
media to strike another blow at the Evil Empire, the disinformationists
have used the Bulgarian Connection episode to raise sweeping charges
that Bulgaria, acting of course as a Soviet instrument, is engaged in a
campaign to destabilize the West by flooding it with narcotics. This
campaign has been quite successful, resulting in diplomatic setbacks for
Bulgaria and adding to the established truth that the Soviet Bloc is be-
hind international terrorism, now expanded to include "narco-ter-
rorism."

In this appendix we address two specific claims advanced by the dis-
informationists. These are, first, that the Bulgarian state agency KIN-
TEX organizes much of the international narcotics flow; and second,
that Bulgaria violates the international conventions establishing the
Transport Intemationaux Routiers (TIR) truck system, even using a TIR
truck to facilitate the escape of Agca's fellow assassin, Oral Celik. To
assess these claims we will look at the evidence put forward at two U.S.
congressional hearings that were held in the summer of 1984 on the Bul-
garian role in arms and narcotics smuggling. Paul Henze participated in
both of these hearings, being joined by representatives of the State De-
partment, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Cus-
toms Service, and by supposed experts on Bulgarian drug smuggling.
These hearings, which allowed only marginally dissenting notes from
the main theme of Bulgarian guilt, afforded the proponents of the Bul-
garian Connection ample scope to present whatever evidence they had.

225

226

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Background to the Hearings

Charges that Agca was linked to Bulgaria through his participation in
Bulgarian-supported drug smuggling had been an integral part of the
pre-confession allegations of the Bulgarian Connection. The Ugurlu-
Mersan-Agca link had been at the heart of both Claire Sterling's Read-
er's Digest article and the NBC "White Paper" broadcast in September
1982. The link between Agca's attempt on the Pope and Bulgarian sup-
port for smuggling was apparently made tighter in early December
1982, when an investigation into arms and drug smuggling in the Italian
city of Trent indicted Bekir Celenk, who had already been named by
Agca as the person who offered him over one million dollars to kill the
Pope. The charge that the Bulgarian state import-export agency KIN-
TEX was involved with smuggling was included in Italian Defense
Minister Lagorio's speech to the Chamber of Deputies on December 20.
And the arrest of Celenk on smuggling charges was featured by both
Time and Newsweek in their January 3, 1983 issues which put the papal
assassination attempt on the covers of both magazines. 1 The Christian
Science Monitor devoted an article to Turkish investigations into Bulga-
rian smuggling and Bulgarian links to the Turkish "Mafia" on January
20. Four days later New York Times correspondent Henry Kamm re-
ported from Sofia on a press conference held there by Bekir Celenk; and
on January 28 the Times printed another piece by Kamm, "Plot On
Pope Aside, Bulgaria's Notoriety Rests On Smuggling."

Probably the most influential of all the media reports on Bulgarian
smuggling was "Drugs for Guns: The Bulgarian Connection," by
Nathan M. Adams, which appeared in the November 1983 issue of the
Reader's Digest. Adams, a Reader's Digest Senior Editor, claimed that
"over 50 percent of the heroin consumed in Europe and much of that in
the United States flows across Bulgaria's borders with the full knowl-
edge and direct participation of high-ranking [Bulgarian] government
officials." He further claimed that the drugs were "paid for with War-

1 . In November 1 984 the prosecutor in the Trent case issued 37 indictments — of 25 Ital-
ians. 9 Turks. 2 Syrians, and an Egyptian — on charges of smuggling drugs and arms, and
possibly even an atomic bomb. One of the accused was Bekir Celenk. Another was the
Italian film star Rossano Brazzi. See E J. Dionne, Jr. , "Italian Case Uncovers an Alpine
Heart of Darkness," New York Times, November 24. 1984.

APPENDIX B

227

saw-pact weaponry," thus fueling Middle Eastern terrorism. Adams
charged that this action by Bulgaria was the product of a 1970 Bulgarian
Committee for State Security (KDS, later DS) directive to destabilize
the West through the narcotics trade. Adams's article, which he later
claimed was based on six months' research in eight nations, became the
primary source for the congressional investigation into the Bulgarian
role in narcotics trafficking; and although it was deeply flawed, it has
gone unchallenged in the West. 2

Charges that KINTEX was promoting drug dealing were renewed in
April 1984, when a Danish television report was picked up by CBS
News. In its report for April 26, 1984, CBS quoted from a signed letter
from one Peter H. Mulack, a West German national residing in Miami
since 1979. Mulack was allegedly involved in trading in embargoed
high-technology goods with Eastern Europe, and in shipping East Euro-
pean weapons to African nations, primarily South Africa. According to
documents presented by CBS, Mulack told KINTEX that "... I can
deliver the required, electronic material. However, as the material is
under embargo, it will take at least three months to deliver. Payment for
the consignment may be made in heroin or morphine base. ..." CBS
showed a return letter from KINTEX thanking Mulack for committing
himself to "deliver the requested goods and you are willing to accept
payment as mentioned."' This certainly seemed like hard evidence, and
to this day the viewers of the CBS report have not been told a most sa-
lient fact: that the documents they were shown were forgeries, as was
revealed in the fine print of a U.S. congressional report."

2 . Adams was making a career o f such allegations. The July 1982 Reader's Digest ran a
five-page article in which he claimed that vast quantities of drugs were coming to the U.S.
from Cuba and Nicaragua. See William Preston, Jr. and Ellen Ray, "Disinformation and
Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story," CoverlAdion Information Bulletin,
Number 1 9 (Spring-Summer 1983), pp. 9-11.

3 . Cited from Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Al-
coholism and Drug Abuse of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Senate,
98th Congress, 2nd Session. August 8, 1984, p. 76.

4. According to the DEA, the correspondence between the Bulgarians and the West
German dealer shown on Danish television (and also on CBS-TV) was "probably not
genuine," and the DEA "has no corroborating evidence." "Written documentation of il-
licit activities," cautioned the DEA, "is not typical of the modus operandi of KINTEX"
(Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection: United Stales-Bulgarian Relations and Inter-
national Drug Trafficking, Hearings and Markup before the Committee on Foreign Af-
fairs, House of Representatives, 98th Congress, 2nd Session, 1984, pp. 1 13-14). To our
knowledge there has been no follow-up on the question of who forged the documents fed
to Danish TV, nor an investigation of whether CBS-TV was the victim of a deliberate dis-
information ploy.

228

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Accusations that Bulgaria was supporting smuggling, whether for
gain or as a means of destabilizing the West, were clearly important in
straining Bulgaria's ties with Italy, which withdrew its ambassador from
Bulgaria on December 1 1 , 1982; shortly thereafter travel by Bulgarians
to Italy was restricted. ' The United States also acted quickly. In January
1983 the U.S. Embassy in Sofia presented a protest to Bulgaria, citing
what they claimed were the activities of known drug and arms
smugglers in Bulgaria and demanding that something be done. When
Bulgaria's response the following month was judged unsatisfactory,
further protests followed. A decade of cooperation between the two
countries in countering narcotics smuggling was broken off (see below).
Though the State Department successfully lobbied against a bill by Jesse
Helms that would have banned U.S. trade with Bulgaria, in July 1 984 it
banned "nonessential" government travel to Bulgaria. 6

The Hearings

By the summer of 1 984, charges that Bulgaria supported narcotics and
arms smuggling had gained a firm foothold in the western media. This
provided congressional conservatives with a means of pressuring the
State Department on the Bulgarian Connection. A House Foreign Af-
fairs Committee "Task Force on International Narcotics Control" held
hearings on the "Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection: United
States-Bulgarian Relations and International Drug Trafficking," in June
and July of 1984. One of the goals of the committee members was to
urge that the Reagan administration take further diplomatic sanctions
against Bulgaria. 7 A second hearing, on "Drugs and Terrorism, 1984,"
was held by Florida Senator Paula Hawkins in August. The purport of
her hearing was to dramatize the global role of Soviet proxies in narco-
tics smuggling. Both committees heard representatives of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration and U.S. Customs Service, as well as Paul
Henze and Nathan Adams.

5. Loren Jenkins, "Italy Calls Pope Plot 'Act of War,' " Washington Post, December
21, 1982.

6. Clyde Famsworth. "U.S. Restricts Government Travel to Bulgaria," New York
Times, July 10, 1984.

7. See Rick Atkinson, "U.S. Links Bulgaria, Drug Traffic," Washington Post, July
25, 1984.

APPENDIX B

229

At the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the alleged
"Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection" it quickly became apparent
that there was little quarrel among the witnesses about the extent of Bul-
garian nefariousness. Only Jack Perry, a former U.S. Ambassador to
Bulgaria, questioned whether Bulgaria supported narcotics smuggling
and illegal arms trafficking as a matter of state policy, noting that he had
heard nothing about this before being removed by the Reagan adminis-
tration in 198 1 . But the issue of smuggling immediately became entan-
gled with the alleged Bulgarian role in the attempt on the Pope, a charge
pressed not only by Henze but by Senator Altonse D'Amato of New
York. This forced the State Department into an awkward position, for
the measures which the Foreign Affairs Committee proposed would be
tantamount to taking a position on the Bulgarian Connection case in
Rome. This was obviously what Henze and D'Amato wanted; but the
State Department's appeal to postpone any sanctions pending the out-
come of the imminent trial in Italy was finally acceded to by the Com-
mittee. 8

Somewhat lost in this discussion was the weakness of the case for
Bulgarian support of smuggling and arms trafficking. For example, the
central piece of documentary evidence used by several witnesses to sup-
port these charges was Adams's Reader's Digest article, "Drugs for
Guns: the Bulgarian Connection." As noted above, Adams's most sen-
sational charge was that between 1967 and 1970 plans were formulated
by the Soviet Union and Bulgaria to destabilize the West by, among
other things, narcotics. The source for this charge was Stefan Sverdlev,
a defector from the Bulgarian KDS who fled to Greece in 1971. He
claimed that Bulgaria's role in narcotics trafficking was part of a larger
Warsaw Pact project initiated in 1967 to destabilize the West.
(Sverdlev's dubious evidence is analyzed in Appendix C.) Adams
charged that between 1970 and 1980 "billions upon billions of dollars'
worth of narcotics and arms were moved or exchanged through Bulgaria
by the state trading agency KINTEX, whose clandestine activities
were — and are — under the direct control of the First Directorate of the
DS. . . ."'

8. On September 12.1 984 , W. Tapley Bennett, Jr. wrote to the Committee on behalf of
the State Department: "Any legislation declaring or implying a U.S. belief in Bulgarian
wrongdoing should await the outcome of the Italian judicial proceedings concerning the
attempted assassination of the Pope. . Senior Italian officials have urged us to maintain
this position of strict non-intervention." Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection, op
cit.. n. 4, pp. 90-91.

9. Ibid., p. 74.

230

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

It was on the basis of Adams's article that members of the Foreign
Affairs Committee casually bandied about their estimates of the extent
of Bulgarian state smuggling. Adams charged that in the late 1970s
"approximately 25 percent of heroin reaching the United States either
moved through Bulgaria or was in some way abetted by KINTEX." 10
This preposterous statement was reduced in the Committee's bargaining
with the representative of the DEA to a more modest 10 percent. Yet in
response to written questions at the conclusion of the Committee's hear-
ings, the DEA admitted, that they had "no substantive evidence to sup-
port these allegations,"" and that "there is not enough evidence to in-
dict any Bulgarian official at this time." 12

The Customs Service's testimony also helped to demystify the TIR
trucking system, whose alleged abuse by the Bulgarians had become
such a central issue in the Bulgarian Connection case. The Customs Ser-
vice pointed out that (a) the TIR Convention made provision for on-the-
spot inspection where smuggling was suspected, so that the system was
not a carte blanche for smuggling; (b) the U.S. shipping industry had a
major stake in the continuation of the TIR system; (c) "recent trend as-
sessments by DEA indicate that overland transportation of drugs has de-
creased considerably over the last decade"; and (d) "U.S. Customs
does not have a documented factual basis to conclude that Bulgaria has
violated the TIR system and we are not aware of any other agency hav-
ing such information."" Thus, whatever allegations were made by the
DEA, the State Department, and by western disinformationists, the
U.S. agency most likely to be aware of Bulgarian violations of the TIR
Convention did not believe there was much substance to them.

Finally, Bulgarian guilt was reinforced for members of the Foreign
Affairs Committee by the frequent reminders coming from both DEA
and the State Department that the U.S. Customs Service had broken off
its earlier relationship with their Bulgarian counterparts — a relationship
which had involved training programs, conferences, and information
exchanges. Once again, however, the fine print at the end of the Com-
mittee's report revealed a more complex story. The Customs Service

10. Ibid. . p. 75.

11. Ibid., p. 113.

1 2. Ibid., p. 1 14. This denial was repeated by the DEA in answer to a similar question
at Senator Hawkins's "Drugs and Terrorism, 1984" hearings later in the summer: "No
direct association between KINTEX and the 'Gray Wolves' has been reported to the
DEA" (Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, op. cil., n. 3. p. 64).

13. Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection, op. cit., n. 4, pp. 131-35

APPENDIX B

231

acknowledged that the United States and Bulgaria lacked the kind of ex-
change agreement which Bulgaria had negotiated with several coun-
tries, including West Germany and Austria, under which investigations
by one country's customs service are carried out at the request of
another country's service. Negotiations for such an agreement had been
begun by the United States and Bulgaria, but were broken off at the di-
rection of the State Department in early 1983. 14 In answer to written
questions the Customs Service stated that it "has no hard evidence that
the Government of Bulgaria has conducted illicit narcotics traffick-
ing." 15 Indeed, it apparently maintained this position at an interagency
meeting on July 18, between the first and the second session of the
Committee's hearings, which was obviously called to iron out the dif-
ferences in the stories being given the Committee by the two agencies.
Noting that the DEA representative at the meeting had admitted that
"evidence in DEA's possession would be considered hearsay in an Eng-
lish court of law and that credible evidence would be difficult to ob-
tain,""' the Customs Service refused to budge from its position. In fact,
in answer to another question, the Customs Service stated that "the ces-
sation of customs contact between U.S. and Bulgarian Customs is a pos-
ition which is not enthusiastically supported by customs administrations
of U.S. allies.""

While there are many loose ends in the question of Bulgarian state
participation — or even direction — in the smuggling trade that clearly
sends vast quantities of drugs and other contraband back and forth be-
tween Western Europe and the Middle East, for certain interests in both
the United States and Italy these charges constituted a target of opportu-
nity. The availability of uncheckable testimony from defectors, con-
victed smugglers, and others with real or fabricated "information" to
sell provided a ready and endless supply of material to document
charges of Bulgarian culpability. Yet without the implication of Bul-
garia in the attempt on the Pope it is doubtful that there would have been
any market for these charges. A search through the indexes of the
Washington Post and the New York Times, for example, reveals that

14. Ibid., p. 84.

15. Ibid., p. 115.
16 Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 131

232

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

only a few articles published prior to 1982 even allege any Bulgarian
participation in narcotics smuggling. Yet following the arrest of An-
tonov media interest in Bulgarian smuggling blossomed. And even
though no new evidence of substance was discovered, publicity about
alleged Bulgarian smuggling and charges that Bulgaria was behind the
attempt on the Pope were mutually reinforcing, one "confirming" the
other.

The Echo Chamber

As with other aspects of the Bulgarian Connection, the drugs-for-guns
allegations benefitted from a recycling process that appeared to give the
claims independent confirmation. We call this the "echo chamber";
and it has become a hallmark of the work of the disinformationists.

A good example of the echo chamber at work occurred during the
congressional hearings on Bulgarian support for narco-terrorism. On
June 7, 1984, Paul Henze told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs'
"Task Force on International Narcotics Control" that "with Bulgarian
help, what came to be called the Turkish Mafia' set up elaborate net-
works, lodged in part among Turkish workers in Europe, for moving
opium products westward." On July 17 the Wall Street Journal printed
a long article by David Ignatius about the ongoing investigation of
Agca's links to Turkish drug-smuggling bosses, particularly Abuzer
Ugurlu. 18 Ignatius drew on Henze's House testimony and supplemented
this with an interview, in which Henze claimed that "it is inconceivable
that a widely known criminal operative such as Ugurlu could have lived
and worked in Bulgaria without the approval of the Bulgarian intelli-
gence service and the rest of the Bulgarian Communist Party hierar-
chy." In all other respects as well, Ignatius's article was pure Henze,
and was probably inspired by him, as it drew on a Turkish prosecutor's
report which had "received little attention outside of Turkey," and was

18. "Turks Closer to Linking Pope's Assailant with Bulgaria." The alleged Agca-
Ugurlu link contributed to the reopening of the investigation into the murder of Ipekci in
December 1982. just after Agca named Ugurlu. Ugurlu had surrendered himself for arrest
in West Germany in March 1 98 1 , just before the deadline announced by the new Turkish
martial law government for some forty wanted criminals to surrender or lose their Turkish
citizenship. West Germany extradicted Ugurlu to Turkey. Characteristically, Henze and
Sterling never mention that Ugurlu had surrendered himself voluntarily to the West Ger-
man police.

APPENDIX B

233

translated especially for the Wall Street Journal.

Ignatius's long article was then presented to the next meeting of the
House investigative committee by Senator Alfonse D' Amato, an adhe-
rent of the Bulgarian Connection hypothesis and a collaborator with
Claire Sterling since the fall of 1981. D' Amato claimed that the article
corroborated the findings of Sterling and Henze. And a little over a
week later, testifying before a Senate subcommittee looking into "the
link between drugs and terrorism," Henze cited the Journal article
("the only U.S. newspaper to report these developments") in support of
his Agca-Ugurlu-Bulgaria linkage. "

Thus, in the real world of the disinformation process, two congres-
sional committees had heard witnesses testify about the Agca-Ugurlu-
Bulgaria link. The testimony had been supported by a Wall Street Jour-
nal investigation. And the Journal, drawing on a previously unknown
Turkish prosecutor's report and expert testimony before Congress, had
updated its readers on the growing evidence that Bulgarian-backed
smuggling formed the root of the Bulgarian Connection. It would be
only natural for the creators and consumers of "informed opinion" to
believe that a fact of some importance was being confirmed by several
sources. It is unlikely that anyone noticed that these apparent confirma-
tions were only the echo chamber at work, reverberating another of
Henze 's claims to create the appearance of multiple confirmation.

19. Drugs and Terrorism, 1984. op. cil.. n. 3, p 97

c. Hie Use and Misuse
of Defectors

During the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, some ex-com-
munist witnesses briefly made a new career for themselves, testifying
and writing about their first-hand experience with the communist
menace. Not surprisingly, this new profession fell under the sway of
economic laws; and ex-communist witnesses were forced to develop
and improve their products once the novelty of their original message
wore off. As noted by David Caute, "invention" was "the specialty of
renegades, who traded heavily in mounting American popular fears,"
and Soviet emigres "were always ready to delight congressional com-
mittees with the wildest 'inside stories' of diabolical Kremlin plots.'"
By their assertions and claims of Red evil the ex-communist witnesses
helped to legitimate the repression of the Red Scare era; and subsequent
exposure of much of their information as completely fictitious had only
a marginal impact on the media's receptivity to similar testimony by
other witnesses.

What the ex-communist witness was to the era of the Red Scare and
McCarthyism, the defector is to the age of "international terrorism"
and disinformation. 2 Most of those who leave Soviet Bloc countries or
other official enemies of the United States, of course, simply come to
the West to start a new life. Some emigres undoubtedly hope to return,
and await the collapse of whatever regime rules his or her homeland.
And some take up the cause of counterrevolution, whether it be as con-

1 . David Caule, The Great Fear (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 131-32.

2. To our knowledge there are no studies which scrutinize the sum total of defector evi-
dence analogous to the several useful studies of ex-communist witnesses of the Red Scare
era. See, (or example, Herbert Packer's Ex-Communist Witnesses (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1962); or Victor Navasky's Naming Names (New York: Viking Press,
1980).

234

APPENDIX C

235

Iras, as broadcasters for Radio Free Europe, or as analysts for the CIA.
The defector may share one or more of these attributes, but to be a de-
fector the 6migr6 must possess certain other characteristics which are of
use to the West. The value of defectors is governed by two things: the
information that they bring with them, and their willingness to bear wit-
ness to the evils of the state they left behind. Some defectors, such as
star athletes or dancers, can fulfill this latter category passively, simply
by living and performing in the West. But government workers or mili-
tary officers, having no independent source of fame — and thus salabil-
ity — in the West, must provide important information and/or be willing
to testify publicly about life in the East, and especially about the plans
and methods of the Soviet-Bloc rulers.

The testimony of defectors, however, is extremely unreliable and eas-
ily subject to manipulation. For one thing, many defectors are bitter and
may want to generate hostility against their homeland, which may lead
them to inflate or invent negative information. Furthermore, defectors
who claim a lot of knowledge about the enemy are more marketable
than those admitting that they know very little. Once defectors have
been debriefed in the West on their areas of expertise, however, they
have nothing else to sell, and must either enter the private economy or
' 'discover' ' new information to remain employed by the public sector.
This provides a market incentive to create information.

Sometimes sudden shifts in consumer demand reactivate old defec-
tors. This was the case with the Bulgarian Connection, which breathed
new life into the market for Bulgarian defectors. Elements of the secu-
rity services of the West are often willing to connive with defectors to
concoct serviceable points of disinformation, and to use defectors to
convey these documents to the mass media. Edward Jay Epstein cites
the testimony of former CIA officer Joseph Burkholder Smith, "who
disclosed that the CIA had sent a Soviet defector to deliver [Reader's
Digest editor John] Barron a story it had wholly invented," and which
Barron subsequently used in his published writings under Reader's Di-
gest auspices. 3

A timely illustration of the political economy of the defector can be
found in the case of former Soviet diplomat Arkady Shevchenko, whose
book Breaking With Moscow became a best seller in mid- 1985. Two
fine investigative reports have traced the rehabilitation and marketing of

3. Edward J. Epstein, "The Spy Who Caine In To Be Sold," New Republic, July 15-
22, 1985, p. 41.

236

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Shevchenko. After his defection in 1978, he initially produced material
which was then characterized by Time magazine as "far less valuable as
an intelligence source than had been anticipated." Based on its own in-
telligence sources. Time concluded that Shevchenko "had little knowl-
edge of the inner workings of current Soviet policies or intelligence op-
erations." This estimate was shared by analysts from the Defense Intel-
ligence Agency. Indeed, when the Simon and Schuster publishing house
received the completed manuscript of Shevchenko's story in 1979, for
which they had advanced $146,000 on their $600,000 contract, they
sued for the return of their advance because the book "did not contain
sufficient new material about the Soviet Union to merit its publication.
There were no revelatory firsthand conversations with Soviet leaders —
and no mention of any espionage activities by him." 4

But in 1984, in a new political climate with a lower threshhold of gul-
libility, Shevchenko's memoirs returned to the publishers. This time
they were repackaged, with entirely new sections on his alleged conver-
sations with Khrushchev, and with the revelation that he had actually
been a mole for the CIA all along. Edward Jay Epstein made a point-by-
point analysis of the plausibility of several of Shevchenko's claims,
characterizing them as "demonstrably fictitious," and calling Shev-
chenko "the spy who never was." Moreover — and of great relevance to
the Bulgarian Connection — Epstein pointed out that Shevchenko's
"super mole" activities were first passedonby theCIA to the Reader's
Digest's John Barron, and that Barron incorporated them into his 1983
publication, The KGB Today: The Hidden Hand. Coverage by CBS's 60
Minutes, a Time cover story, a best seller, a lucrative movie deal, and a
position as a regular commentator on Soviet affairs for ABC News soon
followed. Shevchenko's marketability has been completely untouched
by the exposure of his fabrications. 5 Thus Shevchenko shares with
Mehmet Ali Agca this dubious distinction: Two of the most famous
disinformation sources of our era have been sold to the U.S. public
through a series of fabrications that began with the collaboration of

4. Ibid., pp. 3S-36. See also David Remnick, "Shevchenko: The Saga Behind the Best
Seller," Washington Post, June 15, 1985. The quotations from Time are cited in Epstein,
op cit., n 3., p. 35.

5. In November 1985, for example, the New York Times published Shevchenko's Op-
Ed article on the redefection of Soviet KGB official Vitaly Yurchenko. ("A Lesson of the
Yurchenko Affair," November 12. 1985). And ABC called upon Shevchenko to com-
ment on the significance of the Summit. Long after Epstein's expos£, the New York Times
Book Review gave favorable notice and an unqualified recommendation of Shevchenko's
book to its readers. (December 8, 1985: January 26, 1986.)

APPENDIX C

237

western intelligence services and the Reader's Digest.

Shevchenko's story is illustrative of the role of the defector in fab-
ricating myths about Soviet strategies to defeat the West. Needless to
say, writers such as Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen do not pause for even a
moment to consider whether defector testimony presents any problems
of veracity. A delightful example of this is found in Sterling's The Ter-
ror Network, where she brings in a Czech defector, Major General Jan
Sejna, to support her claim that the Soviets had set up terrorist training
camps as far back as 1964. Indeed, Sejna's testimony plays a central
role in Sterling's argument about Soviet responsibility for international
terrorism. Yet it tums out that Sejna had been debriefed by western in-
telligence in 1968, and had never mentioned this important information,
because (according to Sterling) "nobody ever asked him about such
matters." It wasn't until 1980, when Michael Ledeen fortuitously asked
Sejna about Soviet plans for international terrorism, that Sejna thought
to tell anyone about the terrorist training camps. This convenient recol-
lection coincided with the Haig-Ledeen demand for just this kind of in-
formation, essential to make the transition from "human rights" to "in-
ternational terrorism" as the public relations face of the new administra-
tion's foreign policy.

Sejna's testimony, however, does not withstand examination. Leav-
ing aside the absurdity that Sejna would let such an accusation languish
in his notes for 12 years before bringing it to public attention, as we
noted in Chapter 6, Sejna's claims were so implausible that the CIA
concocted a document outlining a supposed Soviet plan for world domi-
nation. When it was shown to Sejna, he verified it as authentic." There
is evidence that this document, with Sejna as a conduit, served to feed
the fires of the anti-Soviet and anti-terrorism crusades of the late 1 970s.
In 1981 the New York Times'* Leslie Gelb was told by intelligence offi-
cials, skeptical about information on terrorism coming to them from
European intelligence agencies, that "what we are hearing is this 10-
year old testimony coming back to us through West European intelli-
gence and some of our own CIA people." 7 Alexander Cockbum claims
that Amaud de Borchgrave rushed back from France in 1978 with the ex-
citing new information from French intelligence that the Soviets had a

6. Lars-Erik Nelson, "The deep terror plot: a thickening of silence," New York Daily
News, June 24, 1984, p. CI 4: Alexander Cockbum, "Beat the Devil," The Nation, Au-
gust 17-24. 1985. p 102.

7. Leslie Gelb, "Soviet-Terror Ties Called Outdated," New York Times, October 18.
1981

238

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

master plan for world domination, which was the CIA forgery repack-
aged once again. Alexander Haig had also been delighted with the
Sejna-based stories, particularly as cited by Claire Sterling in The Ter-
ror Network, and was quite annoyed that his own officials kept telling
him that "he was basically repeating the stories of the Czech defec-
tor." 8

Between them, Shevchenko and Sejna illustrate several general prin-
ciples of the political economy of defectors that we noted earlier. They
serve a critical role in testifying publicly about the Soviet system. They
appear to be the conduits of forged or imaginary documents. And their
value is closely tied to market conditions, rising steeply during the
Reagan administration. This latter point has been doubly applicable in
the case of Bulgarian defectors, whose boats have risen with the tide,
but who have been especially lifted by the alleged Bulgarian Connec-
tion. In Chapter 7 we briefly noted the useful role played by Jordan
Mantarov, the agricultural mechanic who claimed to have been on the
staff of the Bulgarian Embassy in France, and to have passed on infor-
mation on the plot to kill the Pope to French intelligence. Discredited,
Mantarov has quietly passed into at least temporary obscurity.

Perhaps the person who has gained the most by the sudden rise in the
marketability of Bulgarian defectors is Stefan Sverdlev, a former Bulga-
rian official who defected to Greece in 1971. Sverdlev was a colonel in
the Bulgarian State Security Service, the KDS (now DS). After the ar-
rest of Antonov in November 1982, Sverdlev was the western media's
primary source for the claim that, if the Bulgarians were involved, the
Soviets must have known about it because the Bulgarian security ser-
vices are completely dominated by the Soviets." This claim, of course,
could only be used so many times before its novelty wore off. And so

8 Ibid,, Cockbum, op. cit., n. 6; and Nelson, op. cit., n. 6.

9. According to Claire Sterling, "lengthy interviews with Col. Sverdlev have appeared
in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Newsweek, the Reader's Digest,
the leftwing Paris daily Liberation, the conservative Le Figaro, and the Italian Socialist
Party's A vanti : . " ("An Eastern Defector's Family Is Taken for a Ride Home," Wall Street
Journal, November 23, 1983.) The burden of Sterling's article, incidentally, was to de-
scribe the alleged kidnapping of Sverdlev's wife and 1 3-year-old son by the Bulgarians on
the weekend of November 12-13, 1983. Neither Sterling nor the Journal followed up on
this sad story. As the New York Times reported three weeks later, it quickly became appar-
ent that Sverdlev's wife was unhappy in the West and returned, taking their son with her.
"She has done this because she has the nature of an adventurer," said Sverdlev. James
Markham, "Bulgarian Exiles Get Reminder from Motherland," New York Times, De-
cember 12. 1983.

APPENDIX C

239

Sverdlev, like the ex-communist witnesses of an earlier era, developed a
new product.

Sverdlev's new area of specialization became the alleged Bulgarian
role in international narcotics trafficking. He served as the primary
source for Nathan Adams's 1983 Reader's Digest article, which in turn
served as the major documentary "evidence" for the House Foreign Af-
fairs Committee hearing on the "Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connec-
tion" in the summer of 1984.'° Just as Maj. Gen. Sejna suddenly recall-
ed critical evidence on Soviet support f or international terrorism when
he was interviewed more than a decade after his defection by Michael
Ledeen, the most important piece of news that Sverdlev gave Nathan
Adams in 1983 was about the existence of a secret 1970 Bulgarian di-
rective to implement a 1967 Warsaw Pact plan to destabilize and corrupt
the West through narcotics. Sverdlev had not thought to tell anyone
about this directive before his interview with Adams." Needless to say,
Sverdlev did not have this directive in his possession; it had been left be-
hind with Greek intelligence, he claimed, when he left Greece for West
Germany in 1977. (Conditions in Greece apparently became steadily
less comfortable for him after the fall of the Colonels' junta in 1974.)
But he did remember the document's date (July 16, 1970) and its
number (M- 120/00-0500), despite the fact that he had not been called
upon to retrieve this information from his memory in over a decade.

Sverdlev's testimony is highly suspect. It seems unbelievable that,
given his apparently continuing connection with western intelligence
after leaving Greece in 1977, he would fail to mention such a salable
commodity. It also seems unlikely that, given the Greek government's
connections to the CIA, such a document would have been kept from
the Agency prior to 1977. And when former U.S. ambassador to Bul-

10. "Drugs forGuns: The Bulgarian Connection," Reader's Digest, November 1983,
pp. 84-98. These hearings and their context are examined more generally in Appendix B,
above.

1 1. Paul Henze (old the House Foreign Affairs Committee lha I "Many of Sverdlev's re-
velations were taken lightly at the lime he made them, even by intelligence profession-
als." (Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection: United States-Bulgarian Relations and
International Drug Trafficking, Hearings and Markup before the Committee on Foreign
Affairs, House of Representatives, 98th Congress, 2nd Session, 1984, p. 30.) But news of
the Warsaw Pact destabilization plan was apparently omitted completely During Adams's
testimony before the same committee, there was some momentary confusion about
whether Adams's claim to have been the first to hear Sverdlev's information, as Sverdlev
also maintained, was conect A subsequent insertion into the committee s record agreed
with Adams. Ibid. , p °<i

240

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

aria Jack Perry testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee's
hearings on the "Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection," he told the
Committee that "I read aboui that [Sverdlev's claims] in the Reader's Di-
gest, but I was never aware of it when I was on active duty, and I have
never seen that intelligence." 12 Thus it seems most likely that
Sverdlev's document never existed, and that Adams and Sverdlev had
developed the sort of mutually beneficial relationship which character-
izes the contemporary misuse of defectors.

In sum, defectors are now part of the market system, with the demand
for particular kinds of evidence eliciting the required supply. This sys-
tem only works because the mass media refuse to look critically at sys-
tem-supportive claims. Even devastating exposds of a Sejna or Shev-
chenko fail to dislodge charlatans or constrain the use of demonstrable
fraud. This allows the system of defector mobilization and management
to continue unimpaired.

12. Ibid.

D. Sterling versus Andronov

The methodology used by Claire Sterling and Paul Henze can be readily
employed to prove CIA involvement in the assassination attempt against
the Pope. This was done by Soviet journalist Iona Andronov in his
monograph On the Wolfs Track.' Although we do not find it very con-
vincing, Andronov provided a somewhat more compelling case than
Sterling and Henze. As he advanced the wrong villain, however, his
work has been ignored in the West. A brief comparison of Sterling and
Andronov may be instructive in showing the irrelevance of method and
the overwhelming importance of proper conclusions in mass media
choices of stories to feature.

Red Network Methodology Applied to Bulgarian and CIA
Connections.

Red Network methodology starts with the prior knowledge of Red Cen-
ter guilt. In consequence, it does not require much in the way of sup-
porting evidence. The heart of the method is to find "linkages" and
then to search around for someone who will say that the linkages reflect
"control" by the Red Center. Thus, after a protracted search described
at great length in The Time of the Assassins, Sterling found an unnamed
Interpol agent who gave "his oath" that the Bulgarian secret services
controlled the Turkish Mafia. 2 Experts in this area, including the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, and Turk-
ish journalist Ugur Mumcu, have stated repeatedly that there is no evidence
that Bulgaria controls the Turkish Mafia. Sterling prefers the claim of
the anonymous informant (if he exists) who asserted Bulgarian control,

1. Iona Andronov, On the Wolfs Track (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1983).

2. The Time of the Assassins (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983). p 225

241

242

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

and on this basis Bulgarian control becomes definitive fact for Sterling. 3
The Turkish Mafia works frequently with the Gray Wolves. Based on
this association. Sterling says "The Wolves were being run by this huge
contraband ring, the Turkish Mafia, unique in the world in that it was
really working for a Communist state corporation under the sponsorship
of the Communist state of Bulgaria. ' ' 4 Thus once again we move f rom a
linkage to control, here without even bothering with the anonymous
confirmation. Supplemented by the imputed motive, the Soviet desire to
stop the Polish Solidarity movement, the Bulgaria-Turkish Mafia-Gray
Wolves-Agca links become a chain of command responsible for the as-
sassination attempt.

Using this same Red Network methodology, it is not at all difficult to
put up an imaginative demonstration that the CIA was behind the plot to
kill the Pope. This is the case that Andronov develops, which is the east-
em variant of the Sterling model. Andronov argues, as does Sterling,
that the Gray Wolves themselves had no real motive for shooting the
Pope; they had to be manipulated by an external power. The purpose of
the Plot was to discredit the Soviet Union, in accordance with the new
Reagan-Haig anticommunist crusade. It depended for its success on the
likelihood that the western press "will jump at the murky fabricated ac-
cusations against Moscow and Sofia of complicity in international ter-
rorism."' Andronov acknowledges that such an act against the Pope
seems incredible even for the CIA, but he notes that the CIA hired
Mafia murderers to try to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro, and
he claims that there is a profascist grouping within the CIA that is capa-
ble of anything."

Andronov puts great weight on the linkages built up by the CIA in
Turkey with the extreme Right. He points out that former CIA agent
Frank Terpil acknowledged supplying arms and training to the Gray
Wolves. He quotes Mumcu's statement that Tiirkes, the head of the
Nationalist Action Party, "has always been strongly connected with the
CIA.'" Andronov claims that the Turkish papers were full of reports

3. "He [Agca] was picked by a unique criminal band called the Turkish Mafia, which
operates out of Sofia, Bulgaria, which, indeed, is under the direct control and supervision
of the Bulgarian Secret Service. ' ' "Why Is the West Covering Up for Agca: Exclusive In-
terview with Claire Sterling," Human Events, April 21, 1984.

4. Ibid.

5. Op. ci/., n. I, p. 46.

6. Ibid., p. 43.
7 Ibid., p. 33.

APPENDIX D

243

that the CIA armed the Gray Wolves and that the United States funded
Tiirkes. He agrees with Sterling and Henze that the terror of the late
1970s aimed at destabilization; but, reversing the Sterling-Henze line, he
contends that destabilization was rightist in origin and served U.S. and
rightwing interests. Andronov claims that the murder of lpekci on Feb-
ruary 1, 1979, was part of this U.S. -inspired destabilization effort,
lpekci was deeply concerned about the destabilization program and had
assailed the Gray Wolves as an instrument of murder. Two weeks be-
fore his assassination, on January 13, 1979, lpekci met by appointment
Paul Henze, former CIA station chief in Turkey and at the time on the
staff of the National Security Council. Andronov proposes that lpekci
was warning Henze and urging him to control his subversive program in
Turkey. 8

For Andronov, a key link in the U.S. -backed destabilization effort
was Ruzi Nazar, a former Nazi who worked in the U.S. Embassy in
Turkey with Henze and then moved to West Germany. Nazar served in
both Turkey and West Germany as the U.S. liaison with the Gray
Wolves. Andronov cites several individuals, including Mumcu, who
say that Nazar had real influence over the Gray Wolves.*

Andronov's scheme of linkages and controls is as follows: Agca's
paymaster in Europe was Celebi, a high Gray Wolves official in West
Germany. It was Celebi who gave Agca the final go-ahead on the assas-
sination attempt in April 1981 . Celebi, however, was a subordinate of
both Tiirkes and Enver Altayli, an associate of Tiirkes who was in con-
trol of all Turkish fascist finances and Gray Wolves propaganda. An-
dronov quotes from an interview with Orsan Oymen, the Bonn corre-
spondent of Milliyet: "According to information I have, Altayli collabo-
rates with the American CIA.'" 0 The linkages are complete: a CIA-
Gray Wolves-Agca connection is confirmed by at least three named
sources.

Although we do not believe these arguments to be true, the Andronov
case is far stronger than Sterling's. What gives it special strength is the
consistency of motive and results. The motive was to incriminate the
Soviet Union and discredit it in the eyes of the world, to help Reagan
convince the U.S. public to accept a major rearmament and to persuade
Europeans of the necessity of Pershing and cruise missiles. What is

8. Ibid., p. 30.

9. Mumcu reproduces a long letter from Gray Wolves leader Enver Altayli to Tiirkes in
which a cooperative relationship with Nazar is made clear. See above, p. 64, n. 49.

10. Op. cit., n. I, p. 39.

244

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

more, the assassination plot worked well to meet these ends. By con-
trast, Sterling's version requires irrational and exceptionally incompe-
tent Soviet behavior. The Andronov model is consistent with rational
CIA behavior and the results of the plot are compatible with Reagan-
CIA objectives.

Sterling and Henze, of course, would rule out CIA involvement on
the ground that this is not the kind of thing the United States would do.
There is some truth in this. Shooting the Pope, even through a hired sur-
rogate, would be an extraordinary act. It is doubtful that the top officials
of the CIA would authorize it as a means of helping a propaganda war
against the Soviets, even though the CIA has arranged for many at-
tempts to kill foreign leaders." But similar doubts may be raised that the
cautious Soviet leadership would be any more likely to engage in such
an extraordinary and risky venture than the CIA. 12

1 1 . See, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report of the
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence, U.S.
Senate Report No. 94-465, 94th Congress, 1st Session, November 20, 1975

12. See Chapter 2, pp. 14 ISandn. 13. In a fine illustration of Sterling methodology,
in The Time of the Assassins she reports a conversation involving Martin Peretz, editor of
the New Republic and several New Republic interns who think the KGB plot far-fetched:

"Tell me," pursued Marty "What do you think of the story that the CIA plotted
to kill Fidel Castro?" "Oh, that! Of course!" "Why are you so ready to believe
that the CIA would kill Castro, but not that the KGB would kill the Pope?" Marty
went on, intrigued." "Because the CIA does things like that "
Sterling fails to note that the CIA's multiple ef forts t o murder Castro are not "a story" but
are on the record, acknowledged by government authorities. By contrast, the evidence for
a Soviet connection to the plot to kill the Pope is sorely lacking. Furthermore, the doubt-
ing interns may be questioning the logic of the plot, which, as we spelled out earlier, has
serious flaws.

E. Hie Georgetown
Disinformation Center

The papal assassination attempt provided a cornucopia of propaganda
opportunities for hardliners, both in government and out. A well-pub-
licized report by the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), entitled "The International Implications of the Papal
Assassination^ Attempt: A Case of State-Sponsored Terrorism,"' took
full advantage of these opportunities to score political points. While the
title of the document suggests that readers might expect a serious discus-
sion of the substance of the case, Bulgarian and Soviet guilt were as-
sumed beforehand as a working premise. The big question raised by the
report was: What should U.S. responses be if the Soviets are shown to
be behind the papal shooting? The document thus had the built-in objec-
tivity of a report on an individual entitled: ' 'How should we deal with
John Doe if it is established that he beats his wife?"

The Plot was framed in a Sterlingesque setting in which international
terror is sponsored by states which aim to "undermine world order."
The guilty state is of course the Soviet Union, and the point of the CSIS
report was to stress that "the papal case can be used as a symbol" in a
propaganda campaign to dramatize the Soviets as the center of ter-
rorism. The authors of the report faced several problems, however.
First, there is the issue of whether the United States has clean hands.
Are South Africa and Israel terrorist states? Are they U.S. surrogates?
Are the contras U.S. instruments of terror? Are Chile, El Salvador, and
Guatemala engaged in terrorist attacks on their own citizens? Can the
Soviets match the CIA 's numerous attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro?

I. This is a "Report of the CSIS Steering Committee on Terrorism," Zbigniew
Brzezinski and Robert H. Kupperman, Co-chairmen, published in December 1984 by the
CSIS in its Significant Issues Series, Vol VI, No. 20

245

246

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

This issue is mentioned fleetingly in the report and passed by without
serious discussion.

A second problem was that the truth of the Bulgarian Connection had
not yet been decided in the Italian courts at the time the report was pub-
lished. As noted, the conferees assumed Soviet involvement without
presenting any supportive evidence. Co-chairman Robert Kupperman
smoothly asserted in his Overview that "most thoughtful observers"
believe in the Connection. He does not name any such observers nor
provide any citations. The issue of Soviet guilt was also dealt with in a
manner suggesting the Henze "print": doubts on this point represent a
"legalistic and narrow-minded" attitude that "is not politically
sound." 2 The report also notes that aggressive U.S. government accusa-
tions of Bulgarian and Soviet guilt might be regarded as interfering with
Italian judicial processes. This did not prevent the conferees from con-
cluding that there should be an "organized effort on the part of the gov-
ernment to develop as much credibility and access to information about
the case as is needed to generate a political attitude."

This perceived need for a more aggressive government propaganda
effort was based on an alleged widespread disbelief in the Plot, which
was attributed to a "prodigious" Soviet disinformation effort. The con-
ferees agreed that the western media had been penetrated and that Soviet
disinformation had "had an effect." The western media lacked aware-
ness "about how disinformation functions." The conferees did not con-
sider U.S. disinformation, which may not exist for them. This stress on
Soviet disinformation and western media victimization is a longstanding
focus of the Henze-Sterling-de Borchgrave school, which tries to make
all dissenting opinion a product of Red influence, not disagreement
about the facts. This vision leads naturally to the conclusion that we
should bring Big Government into play to deal with this menace: The
CSIS report urges the U .S. government to use "informal connections"
to "discourage the internal process of imposing more and more skepti-
cism on the Bulgarian (and possibly Soviet) involvement." (Transla-
tion: the U.S. government should intervene to discourage dissenting
views on the Plot.)

Given the loss of the case in Italy, several questions arise. If, as Kup-
perman suggested, "most thoughtful observers" thought the Bulgarians
and KGB guilty, how did they blunder so egregiously? Could it be that
the people the CSIS regard as "thoughtful" are a wee bit biased,

2. See Chapter 6, pp. 148-149

APPENDIX E

247

perhaps even in the disinformation business? 3 Banish the thought! It is
obvious that the truth did not prevail in Italy because of the power of
KGB disinformation and the West's fear of offending the Soviet Union
and disturbing detente. 4 If I win, justice is done; if I lose, the deck is
stacked.

The composition of the working group that produced the report ena-
bles us to understand its content: Paul Henze, former CIA propaganda
officer; Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to Car-
ter and member of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD); Max
Kampelman, CPD member and Reagan's choice for arms control
negotiator; Ray Cline, formerly of the CIA; Robert Kupperman, "ter-
rorism expert' ' of CSIS; Marvin Kalb, author of the extremely biased
NBC-TV program on the plot; and Amaud de Borchgrave, Red Scare
novelist and editor of Reverend Moon's Washington Times. That de
Borchgrave is an Adjunct Fellow of the CSIS tells us a great deal about
that organization. So does this report in general.

3. Michael Ledeen has been a stalwart of the CSIS. and Kupperman hired as his adviser
on Italy Francesco Pazienza, under multiple indictment in Italy for forgery, theft, and col-
laboration with terrorists. See Chapter 6.

4 This last point is put forward regularly by Sterling. See Preface and Chapter 6.

Index

ABC-TV, 199-200, 204, 213
Adams, Nathan M., 226-27, 228. 230,
239

Adnan (Mehmet Ali Agca's brother), 42,
155,219

Agca, Mehmet Ali, 1, 10, 16-17, 35, 36,
120, 138, 181, 187-88
allegations by (later retracted), of plot

to kill Lech Walesa, 2, 29, 30-32.

33, 117, 157, 192, 193
as a longtime rightwing activist in

Turkey, 42, 48, 50-56, 65, 137-38,

155, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224;

see also Gray Wolves
as an unlikely recruit for Soviet-bloc

secret services, 15-16; see also

Agca, as a longtime rightwing

activist in Turkey
as sole witness against the Bulgarians,

2, 157, 190 , 211
claim of, to be Jesus Christ, ix-x, 39,

155. 181. 194, 196
coaching of, in prison, 3-4, 5, 32, 33,

40-41, 57, 102-12, 1 19, 121-22,

195, 198, 202
credibility of, ix-x. 2. 27, 37-38. 59-

60, 120-21. 183-84, 189. 191, 197.

200-01 , 236-37; see also Agca,

retractions by. of previous testimony
desire of, for public attention, 56-57,

105-6, 108, 196, 200
escape of, from Turkish prison, 52,

137. 140^1
identification of Bulgarians by, 2, 21,

22, 23-24, 26-27, 30, 110-11. 116

influence on, of media presentation of
Bulgarian Connection, 24, 28, 57,
202, 207

initial testimony of, 20, 220-22

long delay of, in naming alleged co-
conspirators, 17-18, 23-24. 107

retractions by, of previous testimony,
17, 31, 32-34, 36, 38, 109-10, 115-
17, 138-40, 157, 181, 192, 193.
194, 196-97, 200, 201

role of. in assassination of progressive
newspaper editor Ipekci, 52, 187,
217, 222

testimony of, in second trial, ix-x, 39,
194-97

threat by, to kill the Pope in Turkey,
14, 52-53, 156, 186, 187, 196

trial of. in July 1981. 18-19

trip to Bulgaria by, 13-14. 16. 20. 53,
184, 187, 207, 210-11
Agca Dossier (Mumcu), 1 37-38
Agee, Philip, 132
Ahmad, Feroz, 49, 51-52
Aivazov, Todor, 17, 28, 32. 35. 107,

115, 117. 140
Albano, Antonio, 36, 87, 104, 122, 191,

210

Albano Report, 15-16, 36, 109-10, 119,
190-94, 203-4

coverage of, in western media, 6, 181,
190-94, 200-201

leaking of. 33. 36. 119. 120. 140
Amnesty International. 151
Andronov, Iona, 64, 133, 141-42, 170,

179, 241-44
Andropov, Yuri, 1-2
Angleton, James, 74, 132
Antonov, Mrs. Rossitsa, 17. 117, 120-

21, 140. 176, 193, 200
Antonov, Sergei, 2, 101, 127

Agca's testimony against, 17, 32-33,
36, 109-10, 1 11-12, 1 16-17, 212

248

INDEX

249

arrest of, 23, 28, 177
Apple, R. W., Jr., 217, 221-22, 223-24
Arms Smuggling and Terrorism

(Mumcu), 27, 59-60
Ascoli Piceno prison, 102, 103, 195
Atlantic Community, 148

Bagci, Omer, 50, 54
Banco Ambrosiano, 38, 84, 94, 97, 99
Barron, John, 134, 235, 236
"Bayramic," 27, 28, 110, 111
Begin, Menachem, 68, 69
Belarus Secret, The (Loftus), 62-63
Belmonte, Giuseppi, 91, 92, 93, 108,
122

"Billygate" scandal, 5, 95-96, 99

Birindelli. Admiral, 89

Board lor International Broadcasting,

147-48
Bonner, Raymond, 165
Borghese, Prince Junio Valerio, 72, 74,

Breaking with Moscow (Shevchenko),
235-36

Breytenbach, Breyton, 129-31
Briand. Ali, 152
Brink, Andre, 130
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 67, 145, 147,
149, 160, 161, 179, 185, 203, 247
Buckley, William F , Jr , 175, 177
Bulgarian Connection:
alleged Soviet motivation in, 14-15,

20, 24-25, 55, 144, 184, 210
discrediting of, in second trial, ix-xi,

2, 39-41, 181, 194-97
emergence of, in 1981-82, 20-29, 222
logical difficulties presented by, 12-18,

36-37, 55-57, 187-88, 210-12
multiple origins of, 206-7. 208-9; see
also Agca, coaching of; Mafia;
secret services, Italian; Vatican
post-trial attempts to rehabilitate, xii-

xv, 214-215
propagation of, by U.S. media, xi-
xvii, 1, 5-6, 7-8, 123, 176-89, 213-
14, 215; see also individual
publications and TV networks
Reagan administration as beneficiary
of, I, 71, 100, 101, 123, 145
Bush, George, 69

Calvi, Roberto. 84, 94. 97

Caprara, Massimo, 75-76
carabinieri, Italian, 76-77, 79-80, 89
Carter, Barry, 185, 188
Carter, Billy, 95-96
Catli, Abdullah, 13, 40-41, 54, 65, 90,
121

Caute, David, 234
Cavallero, Roberto, 80, 81
CBS-TV News, 183, 184-85, 227
Celebi, Musa, 27, 35, 54. 56. 120, 155,
156, 243

Celenk, Bekir, 26, 27, 40, 59-60, 109,
140, 226

Celik, Oral, 21, 22. 26, 37 . 51, 52, 54,

115, 121, 155, 207, 212. 221, 225
Cem, Ismail, 62

Central Intelligence Agency, 69, 70,
132-33, 135, 136. 142, 146, 159, 236
alleged involvement of, in papal

assassination attempt, 179, 242-44
and Korean airliner incident, 163, 215
in Italy, 5, 59, 73, 75. 77. 80. 99,
160

links of, to right-wing Turks, 61-64,
242-43

Paul Henze as longtime employee of,
64, 133. 142, 146-47, 150, 154,

243

reaction of, to Bulgarian Connection
theory, 29, 145^16, 177-78
Cheme, Leo, 148

Christian Science Monitor, 7, 147, 183,
226

CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency
Cilleri, Giuseppi, 106, 208
Cirillo, Ciro, 66, 92, 97
Cline, Ray. 69, 159, 247
Coalition for a Democratic Majority

(CDM), 67, 69
Cockbum, Alexander, 124. 237
Commentary, 203

Commission on Security and Cooperation

in Europe. 25
Committee on the Present Danger (CPD),

Communist Party of Italy (PCI), 66, 76,

79. 83. 92. 100. 144. 191
Consolo, Giuseppi, 103, 107
Coogan, Kevin, 90
Corriere delta Sera, 83-84, 160
Counter-Guerrilla, 6 1 , 62
Craxi, Bettino, 91, 97, 100, 101, 196
Crozier. Brian, 69, 133

250

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

CSIS. See Georgetown Center for

Strategic and International Studies
Curiel, Henri, 129, 130, 134-35, 197
Cutolo, Raeffele, 97-98, 104, 109, 209

D'Amato, Sen. Alfonse, 25-26, 145,

229, 233
D'Amato. Federico, 90
D'Amato, Umberto, 96
Darkness at Noon (Koestler), 101
de Borchgrave, Amaud, 26, 1 18, 124,

134, 135, 159, 160, 161, 168-69, 191,

238-39, 247
De Lorenzo, Giovanni, 76-77, 79, 80
De Luca, Maurizio, 90
De Lutiis, Giuseppi, 75, 76
de Marenche, Comte Alexandre, 1 19
Deadly Deceits (McGchae), 132
Deger, Emin, 62

delle Chiaie, Stefano, 78, 79, 80, 88,

89. 90, 91
Demirel, Prime Minister Suleyman, 48-

49, 62
Denton, Jeremiah, 7
DIGOS, 20, 35, 221
Dionne. E. J , Jr., 199
Dobbs, Michael, 37, 51, 56-57, 60, 112,

116, 124, 195, 196-97. 200-02, 204,

211, 213

criticisms of, by Claire Sterling, 131,
201

Doherty, William, 165-66
Dontchev, Ivan, 30, 31, 33, 112
d'Ovidio, Pietro, 18
Drama of May 13, The, 102
drug traffic, 57-58, 60

allegations of Bulgarian involvement
in, 29, 58-60, 93, 177, 225-33,
239-40

Duarte, Napoleon, 164, 165

East Timor, 1 75
Ecevit, Bulent, 154
El Salvador, 164-66
"Eof, Mustafa," 20. 21
Epstein, Edward Jay, 235, 236

Federici, Federico, 161
Ferrarcsi, Franco, 87
Fiore, Roberto, 91
Flamini, Gianni, 75
freemasonry, 82

see also Propaganda Due
Fresco. Robert, 62

Gage, Nicholas, 180, 190, 204

Gallucci, Achille, 10

Gans, Herbert, 214

Garment, Suzanne, 6

Gelb. Leslie. 135, 149, 237

Gelli, Licio, 81-84, 87, 92, 94, I 13,

161, 198
Gelman, Hairy. 185, 186
Georgetown Center for Strategic and

International Studies, 5, 159, 186,

202, 245-47
Giannettini, Guido, 85, 89
Gilbert, Sari, 35, 171, 1.72-73, 218, 220-

Ginno, Padre, 103

Giornale Nuovo, 11, 160

Grave New World (Ledeen), 159. 162-

64, 166-73, 198 , 203
Gray Wolves, 34-35, 48, 50, 141, 218,

219, 243

Agca as participant in, 12-13, 50-55,

106, 212, 218, 219, 223
as witnesses in second trial, 39-40
connections of, to CIA. 62-64
involvement of, in smuggling, 57-58,

possible involvement of, in

assassination attempt, 3, 1 1 , 40,
118. 171

relation of, to Nationalist Action Party.

48, 49, 50, 51
sheltering of Agca by, i n western

Europe. 3. 1 1 , 40, 50, 53-55, 65,

120. 220
Grenada, 163-64
Griffiths, William E., 203
Grillmaier, Horsl, 137, 138
Gunes, Hasan Fehmi, 137, 140-41, 144-

45, 218
Gwertzman, Bernard, 177

Haig, Alexander, 70, 94, 96, 136. 171.
238

Hawkins. Sen. Paula, 228

Helsinki Watch, 151-52. 153

Henze, Paul, xi, 7, 67, 125, 145, 156-

59, 161, 170, 193-94, 203, 205, 210,

247

appearances of, on TV, 180-81, 185,
186-89

as apologist for state terrorism in

Turkey, 150-54
as consultant to TV shows, 20, 99,

184

INDEX

251

as longtime CIA employee, 64, 133,

142, 146-47, 150, 154, 243
attacks by, on those with opposing

viewpoints, 131-32, 142, 151, 202
attempts by, to deny that Agca was a

rightist, 49. 51. 52, 55-56
denial by, of need for hard evidence in

making accusations against the

Soviet Union, 149, 150, 207
influence of, on development of

Bulgarian Connection theory, 20,

24, 99, 149-50, 182-84, 207
influence of, on Reader's Digest

article, 99, 149-50
on alleged Bulgarian drug smuggling,

59, 225, 228, 229. 232-33, 239
refusal by. to appear on TV shows

with critics, 124, 147
refutation of, by Ugur Mumcu, 150,

153, 156, 187
see also Plot to Kill the Pope. The

(Henze)
"Henzoff, Boris," 157-59
Hoemeyer, Dr., 102-3
Howe, Marvine, 189, 218, 220, 223
Hunt. E Howard. 133

Ignatius, David, 232-33

Imposimato, Judge, 30-31

In These Times, xv

Infelisi. Luciano, 10, 218, 219

Information Service of the Armed Forces

(SIFAR), 75-77, 79, 80
Inside the Company (Agee), 1 32
Ipekci, Abdi, 51, 52, 187, 217, 222, 243
Israel. 68-69

Italian Social Movement (MSI), 74, 80,
89

John Paul II, Pope, I, 35, 170-71, 185,
200, 223

hostility to, of rightwing Turks, 12,

52, 187, 206
Soviets' alleged motives for wanting

killed, 14-15, 20, 24-25, 55, 144,

184. 210

Johnstone, Diana, xvii, 50. 66-67, 95,

109. 134, 190
Jonathan Institute, 68-70, 100, 101

Kalb. Marvin. 13. 16. 24. 29. 38, 39.

150, 178, 184, 203, 204, 210, 247
Kamm, Henry, 33, 172, 177, 178, 226
Keegan, Major-General George, Jr., 69

KGB, xii-xiii, 1, 8, 16, 131, 133. 141.
143, 180, 181, 184, 187-88, 206
alleged employment of Agca by, 13,
25. 52, 55-56, 156

KGB Today, The (Barron), 236

Kikoski. John F , 203-5

Kisacik. Rasit, 50

Kissinger, Henry A., 149, 159, 160,

161. 203
Koestler. Arthur, 101
"Kolev. Sotir," 26, 27, 28, 29. 30, 32,

1 10, 212

Korean airliner incident, 71, 163, 215
Kovaci, Ismail, 56
Kupperman, Robert, 160, 246, 247
Kwitny, Jonathan. 96. 183

Lagorio. Minister of Defense Lelio,

100, I 10, 118, 212. 226
Landis, Fred, 124-25, 159
Laqueur, Walter, 160, 176
Ledeen, Michael, xi, 135-36, 160, 170-

73, 178, 237, 247

as advocate of hard-line foreign policy,

161-66, 198
as an "authority" on the assassination

attempt. 7, 25, 182, 203
association of, with Francesco

Pazienza, 5, 38-39, 93, 94-97, 99,

160, 199

attacks by, on the madia. 1 66-70. 171-
73

connections of, to extreme Right in

Italy, 160-61
influence of, 7, 125, 182
involvement of, with Italian secret

services, 94-96, 97, 109, 160, 198,

208

role of, in "Billygate" affair, 95-96,
108

role of, in fabricating Bulgarian
Connection, 7, 125, 131

see also Grave New World (Ledeen)
Lee, Martin, 90
Lefever, Ernest, 176
Lehrer, Jim, 186-87, 188
Levin, Murray B., 124, 176
Loftus, John, 62-63
London Times, 217,219, 220, 222
Lugaresi, Gen. Nino, 96-97

MacNeil, Robert, 186, 187, 188
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. 146, 182,
184, 185-89

252

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

appearances on, by Sterling, Henze,
and Ledeen, 7. 8, 147, 180-81, 1 85-
89

Mafia, 208
relation of, to Francesco Pazienza. 38,

92, 97-98
role of, in fabricating Bulgarian

Connection, 3-4, 41, 98, 102, 198
see also Cutolo, Raeffele

"Mafia, Turkish," 59, 60, 61, 192-93,
232, 24l-»2

Malatya gang, 51-52, 57

"Man Who Shot the Pope, The" (NBC-
TV special), 24-25, 26, 28-29, 106,
118, 142, 176, 179. 226

Mantarov, lordan, 180-81. 200, 204. 238

Manyon, Julian, 20

March 12 from the Perspective of History

(Cem), 62
Marchetti, Victor, 73, 77
Marini, Antonio, x, 197
Martella, llario, 59, 101. 107, 110, 190.

210

credulousness of. 87, 115-16, 117-18,

197, 211, 212
ignoring by, of contrary evidence, 17,

23, 51, III. 120, 122
influence on, of Bulgarian

Connnection publicists, 26, 39. 1 1 8-

investigation by, 21-24, 30-31 , 33, 36,

103-4, 199, 211
leaks allowed by. I 19-20
prejudging of case by, 4, 28, I 14-15,

211

role of, in Agca's induced confession,

23, 104, 118
uncritical treatment of, in U.S. media,

xiii, 6. 112-13, 188, 202
see also Martella Report
Martella Report, 3, 15-16, 22-23, 30,
104, 118, 119, 181, 211
weaknesses of, 22-23, 37, 118, 119
Mazzola, Francesco, 20, 25, 98-99
media, U.S.:
criticisms of, by conservatives, 123-

25, 166-70
deference of, to Reagan administration,
70-71

double standard applied by, 1 57-59,

167-68, 174-75
initial coverage by, of assassination

attempt, 1 1, 216-24

propagation by, of Bulgarian
Connection, xi-xvii, I, 5-6, 7-8,
123, 176-89, 213-14, 215; see also
individual publications and TV net-
works

reliance by, on Sterling, Henze, and
Ledeen, 181-89

role of, in propaganda campaigns, xi,
174-76
McGehee, Ralph, 132
Melady, Thomas P., 203-5
Merlino, Mario, 79, 89
Mersan, Omer, 20, 24
Miceli, Gen. Vito, 74, 80-81
Mitliyet, 52. 103. 152, 243
Minna, Rosario, 89
MIT (Turkish intelligence service), 6 1 ,

Morgan-Witts, Max, 35
Morlion, Felix A., 112
Moro, Aldo, 66-67, 79, 143-44
Moss, Robert, 69, 70, 133, 161, 168-69
MSI. See Italian Social Movement
Mulack, Peter H , 227
Mumcu, Ugur, 59-60, 63, 64, 106, 120,
132, 137, 140, 200, 241, 242, 243
refutation by, of Paul Henze, 1 50,
153, 156. 187
Munir, Metin, 217, 218
Musumeci, Pietro, 66-67 , 91, 92 , 93,
97, 98, 104, 106, 109, 122, 209

NAP. See Nationalist Action Party
Nationalist Action Party, II, 47-50, 53,

58, 60, 62, 141, 187, 220, 221, 223

anticommunism of, 60, 64

involvement of, in drug smuggling,
58, 60

origins of, 42-43

relation of, to Gray Wolves, 48, 49,
50,51

NATO, 75, 77, 78, 154, 162

Nazar, Ruzi, 63-64, 243

NBC Nightly News, 8, 38. 59, 149

NBC-TV. 13. 16, 49, 57. 175, 182, 184,

204, 21 1
New Cold War, 3, 6. 7, 66
New York Times, 7, 33, 35, 37, 135,

136, 148, 149, 175, 176, 177, 203,

21 I, 231-32

backing away by, from Bulgarian
Connection theory. 189-90, 195

INDEX

253

coverage of Pazienza scandals by, 38,
39

failure of, to present opposing
viewpoints, 179, 183, 190, 199

ignoring by, of Italian political
context, 6, 196

initial coverage by, of assassination
attempt, 10, 194, 216-24

role of, in disseminating Bulgarian
Connection 1 89-9 1 . 193-99; see also
Sterling, Claire, articles by, in New
York Times; Gage, Nicholas

see also Howe, Marvine; Kamm,
Henry; Whitney, Craig R.;
Tagliabue, John
New York Times Magazine, 70
Newsweek, 37, 135, 149, 150, 171, 172,

176. 183, 226

initial coverage by, of assassination
attempt, 1 1 , 42, 155
Newton, Lowell, 22
photograph by, 21, 26, 32, 115-16,
212, 221
Novak, Michael, 176

O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 134
Oddi, Cardinal Silvio, 103
Oglesby, Carl. 190

On the Wolfs Track (Andronov), 241,

242-44
Orbis. 203-5

Orlandi, Emmanuela, kidnapping of, 33-

34, 1 19, 139, 181, 194
Oymen, Orsan, 27-28, 56, 60, 103. 105-

6, 207, 211, 243
Ozbey, Yalcin, 40, 41, 54, 121, 196,

207

P-2 See Propaganda Due
Pan-Turkism, 43-47, 48. 62, 63
hostility of, to Soviet Union, 45-46,
64

see also Nationalist Action Party
Pandico, Giovanni, 5-6, 41, 98, 103,

104, 106, 109, 121, 195, 209
Panorama, 161
Parisi, Vicente, 90

Pazienza, Francesco, 5, 90, 108, 119,
134, 208, 247

alleged role of, in inducing Agca's
testimony, 105, 106, 108, 131, 208,
209

exposure of, 6, 38, 91-99, 122. 198-

People magazine, 11-12

Perry, Jack. 229, 240

"Petronov," 23

"Petrov," 27, 28, 1 10

Piccoli, Flaminio, 96

Pike Committee, 5, 73

Pipes, Richard, 69, 177, 203

Pisano, Dr Vittorfranco S ., 86-87

Plot to Kill the Pope, The (Henze), 35,

131-32, 147, 151, 205
Political Hysteria in America (Levin),

124

Pollio Institute, 79, 90
Pontiff (Thomas and Morgan-Witts), 35
Pope, the. See John Paul (I, Pope
Priore, Judge Rosario, 30, 31, 113-14
Propaganda Due, 81-85, 101. 134, 198,
208

connections of, with Italian secret
services, 83, 89, 94, 98. 102, 108,
134

exposure of, 4, 6, 1 88

penetration of Italian judiciary by, 113

Reader s Digest, I. 7, 175, 182, 184,
203, 235, 237

on alleged Bulgarian drug smuggling,

226-27. 228, 230, 239
see also Sterling, Claire
Reagan, Ronald, 70, 1 78, 243, 244
Reagan administration:
alleged foot-dragging of. in accepting

Bulgarian Connection theory, xiii,

5, 29, 145-46, 178
as beneficiary of widespread belief in

Bulgarian Connection, I, 71, 100,

101, 123, 145
efforts by, to link the Soviet Union

with ' terrorism," I, 101, 108, 125,

145

military buildup by, I, 70, 123, 145
Real Terror Network, The (Herman), 175
Red Brigades. 29, 30, 66-67, 92-93, 97,

143-44
Red Scares, 7, 175, 176
Repubblica. La, 95
Republican Peasants' Nation Party, 43
Ritter, Rep. Donald, 25
Rizzoli publishing group, 84
Rodota. Stefano, 88
Rose of the Winds conspiracy, 80, 81

254

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Safire, William, 175, 176, 177
Samet, Arslan, 54

Sanliapichi, Judge Severino, 39, 103,
114, 195

Santini, Father Mariano, 103, 109, 208
Santovito, Giuseppi. 83, 92. 94. 96. 99.
134, 191

Scricciolo, Luigi, 30-31 , 32. III. 112
Season in Paradise, A (Breytenbach),
130

secret services, Italian,
abetting of terrorism by, 86-91, 92-93
as rightwing force in Italian politics, 4,
80. 98

connections of, with Propaganda Due,
83. 89. 94. 98. 102. 108, 134

formation of, 75-77

role of, in fabricating Bulgarian
Connection, 3-4, 5, 7, 41, 96-97,
102-3, 108, 118, 198. 206-7, 209.
211

see also. Information Service of the
Armed Forces (SIFAR); SID;
SISDE; SISMI

Sejna, Jan, 97, 135-36, 197, 237-38

Sener. Mehmet, 54, 220, 221

Senzani, Giovanni, 30, 109. 111. 208-9

Shcharansky, Anatoly, 175

Shevchenko, Arkady, 235-37, 238

Sica, Judge Domenico, 95, 96

SID, 75. 76. 78. 80. 88. 89

SIFAR. See Information Service of the
Armed Forces (SIFAR)

SISDE, 75, 83, 90

SISMI. 6, 41, 59, 75, 83. 91, 92, 93,
94-97, 98, 99, 102. 105, 108, 109,
118, 134, 137, 188, 191, 198, 206-7.
209, 211

Slavov, Atanas, 25

Smith, Joseph Burkholder, 235

Solidarity, 14, 20, 25, 144

Soustelle. Jacques, 69

Spagnulo, Dr. Carmelo, 1 1 3

Spike, The (Moss and de Borchgrave),
168-69

Siampa, La, 10, 15, 23, 218, 219
Sterling, Claire, xi, 3, 50-51, 59, 69. 94,
105, 125, 142, 161, 202, 203, 244
allegations by, of cover-up, xiii, 5, 9-

10, 142, 145. 178. 216, 224
appearances by, on TV, 124, 183,
184-85. 186

article by, in Reader's Digest, xi, 1 ,

16, 20, 24, 25, 99, 103, 106, 138.

142, 149-50, 170, 176, 179, 181-

82, 184. 190, 213, 221, 226
articles by. in New York Times, 36,

125. 181. 190-94. 196
attacks by, on those with opposing

viewpoints. 131, 133, 201
characterization by, of Agca as

longtime Soviet agent, 13, 25, 49,

52, 55-56
credulousness of, toward favored

sources, 32. 122, 132-36, 207, 237
distortion of evidence by, 1 25-3 1 , 1 32-

38, 140-41, 207, 224, 24 1-42
influence of, on the investigation in

Italy, 24, 26. 57, 106, 119, 191-92.

207

influence of. yiUS. media

interpretations. 6. 7, 24. 182-85,
188

initial response by, to assassination

attempt, 9-10
logical difficulties posed by theories

of, 14, 16, 107, 138-40. 143-44,

195, 210-11
on South Africa, 129-31
testimony of, to congressional

committees, 13, 25
use by, of discredited testimony by Jan

Sejna, 97, 135-36. 197. 237-38
verdict of slander against, 134-35
see also Terror Network, The

(Sterling); Time of the Assassins,

The (Sterling)
"strategy of tension," 85-87
Subcommittee on Terrorism and Security,
7

Suffer!, George, 130
Sverdlev, Stefan, 229, 238-40

Tagliabue, John, 194-97, 218. 221, 222

Tamburino, Giovanni. 88

Taubman, Philip. 149

Terror Network, The (Sterling), 50, 1 14,

125, 127-29, 133-34, 135-36, 143-44,

190, 197, 237
terrorism:

in Turkey, 49, 50 . 51-53, 62. 144,
154, 243

in Italy, 66-67, 78-79. 86-91 , 92-93,
143-44

INDEX

255

"terrorism," as propaganda term, 1,
67-71, 101, I 14, 127-28. 129, 135-
36, 143-44, 152, 153, 163, 172,
215, 237, 243

Thatcher, Margaret, 91

Thomas, Gordon. 35

Time magazine, II, 135, 170. 171, 172,
176. 178, 183. 226, 236

Time of the Assassins, The (Sterling), 10,
20. 35, 1 19, 142, 197, 216, 241
reviews of, 35, 183, 197

"Tomov, Ivan," 30, 31

Toth, Robert, 178

trials:

of Agca for attempted murder, 18-19
of three Bulgarians and six Turks for
conspiracy, ix-xi, xii, 2, 3, 39-41.
181, 194 97,
Turkes, Col. Alpaislan, 43. 47, 48, 49,

64, 137, 242-43
"TV Eye," 20, 25, 99
"20/20," 142, 199-200

Ugurlu, Abuzer. 24. 59-60, 212, 232

Vassilev, Jelio, 28, 32, 107

Vatican, role of, in fabricating Bulgarian

Connection, 3-4. 102-3, 108, 207
Violante. Luciano, 108

Walesa. Lech. 20. 175

alleged plot to kill. 2. 29, 30-32. 33,
117, 157, 192, 193,
Wall Street Journal, xiv-xv. 6, 125, 147.

176. 182, 232-33
Walters, Vemon, 76, 159
Washington Post, 10, 26, 35, 135, 153,

176, 216-23, 231-32

see also Dobbs, Michael; Gilbert, Sari
Washington Times, 159, 247
Wallenberg, Ben, 69, 176
Weinberger, Caspar, 70, 162
West German police, 121, 207
Whitney. Craig R . 180, 204
Will, George, 69, 176, 177
Woodruff, Judy, 180, 188

Yetkin, Suleyman, 102-3
Yildirim, Rifat, 54
Yurturslan, Ali. 57

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